“Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.”

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

In order to travel far you have to be detached.

the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.

…and yet I am what they think I am.

I am nobody but myself.

Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?

Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.

And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.