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

Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don’t pay attention ’cause it probably has floated into somebody else’s head.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.

Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.

It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.

Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.

I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.

Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.

It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.

When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well.

Those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around.

Absolute trust is something hard to achieve even in a family, and it is much harder to achieve on an international level.

Absolute trust is something hard to achieve even in a family, and it is much harder to achieve on an international level.

I had the time of my life with you Glendale, Arizona.

As women achieve power, the barriers will fall.

The whole world recognizes Russia’s cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.

Despite all the achievements of civilisation, the human being is still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth.

I can be 100 years old but I will always be proud to say I was in Harry Potter.