“The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.”

I swear to the Lord, I still can’t see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.

There is no color line in art.

For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.

Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

It has seemed to me that most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been.

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

Road’s in front o’ me, Nothin’ to do but walk.

I’m so tired of waiting, aren’t you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

When a man starts out to build a world, He starts first with himself

Whiskey just naturally likes me but beer likes me better.

For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn’t write anything.

I dream a world… where wretchedness will hang its head and joy, like a pearl, attends the needs of all mankind. Of such I dream, my world!

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.

I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.

Alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical drugs are legal, but they can hurt a lot of people.

I don’t even drink! I can’t stand the taste of alcohol. Every New Year’s Eve I try one drink and every time it makes me feel sick.

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.

Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.

Promise me one thing: don’t take me home until I’m drunk – very drunk indeed.

I’m very serious about no alcohol, no drugs. Life is too beautiful.

Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.