“We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.”

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

Beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.

Writing is a delicious agony.

Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

The music is in minors.

No man can give me any word but Wait.

We don’t ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you’re telling them that they’re less than somebody else.

I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.

Don’t let anyone call you a minority if you’re black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You’re not less than anybody else.

What I’m fighting for now in my work… for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.

The poetry is myself.

I’m a sappy mom now. I didn’t think I would be. I thought I’d be a cool mom who keeps everything in perspective.

When I got famous, all of a sudden guys wouldn’t look at me. Period. So I felt a little sad, a little frustrated. Like, What’s going on here? I’ve never been prettier in my life and I’m so cool and successful.

That’s cool and all but also screw you.

I’m cool. I don’t need to be skinny. I like to be strong.

Emotion will always win over coolness and cleverness. It’s when a scene works emotionally and it’s cool and clever, then it’s great. That’s what you want.

If each dead person became a ghost, there’d be more than 100 billion of them haunting us all. Creepy, but cool.

The calm, Cool face of the river, Asked me for a kiss.

You just have to play it cool. You don’t want everyone to know you’re an amateur.