“Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.”

In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder

This world’s anguish is no different from the love we insist on holding back.

When the will to learn from the ordinary is present, a seeker may indeed gain entrance into levels of awareness that are extraordinary.

I was reborn a third time to the sound of my name humming haikus in heaven’s mouth.

The uses to which it may be applied are limited only by an individual’s imagination.

As a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.

Friendship fails, Intelligence fails, Humanity: fails.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 laid the foundation for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it also addressed nearly every other aspect of daily life in a would-be free democratic society.

A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmare to the jeweled vision of a life started anew.

What more civilized way for people to alleviate the same than by giving themselves to one another as brothers and sisters in deed as well as in word?

Like a Passover Poet gliding from house to house and from trembling soul to trembling soul the wind scribbled sonnets of first time love and weeping haikus of last hours on earth.

Literary genres and techniques tend to take form in one’s mind somewhat the way computer templates provide form for different computer tasks.

The job facing American voter in the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it,

They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius

The intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years.

True lovers earn their genius in schools of blood, prophecy and dust.

You are the author of your life, so go out and live! Then never quit writing about it!

Well yeah, there’s definitely going to be a little bit of the author in that. But there’s nothing wrong with that.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.

Shakespeare feels very natural to me.

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts.

The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.

Socrates said, our only knowledge was “To know that nothing could be known;” a pleasant Science enough, which levels to an ass Each Man of Wisdom, future, past, or present.

Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!