“Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.”

Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn’t even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.

Love is never any better than the lover.

You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

You are your best thing.

I didn’t want to speak for black people. I wanted to speak to and to be among. It’s us.

I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

Lonely was much better than alone.

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

I type in one place, but I write all over the house.

There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.

Writing is really a way of thinking–not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

Potential is key to our purpose!! There’s fulfillment in perfecting a craft, skill, or a any form of art.

There has never been a work of art created which didn’t somehow reflect its own time.

Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

Art is to console those who are broken by life.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.