“Art hurts. Art urges voyages – and it is easier to stay at home.”

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don’t pay attention ’cause it probably has floated into somebody else’s head.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.

Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.

It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.

Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.

I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.

Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.

It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.

When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well.

I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.

Today, I painted with blood.

Even if you were to lose it all – you would still be art.

Somehow in all this grief I found joy. Sharing art with you has made me whole again. And again.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

I knew nothing about martial arts. The coach told me I was talented with learning martial arts, and put me in a school. Three years later I got my first championship in China.

When we share art we extend a hand. We hold a mirror. We adjust our focus. We hold each other. We weave a collaborative story. Together.

For work, I wear art; in real life, I wear clothes.

Tenderness can be just as abstract as insanity.