“Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.”

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.

The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the ’60s: Independent fire!

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

And if sun comes how shall we greet him? shall we not dread him, shall we not fear him after so lengthy a session with shade?

This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.

People are so in need, in need of help. People want so much that they do not know.

I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.

You do not become a star, you are born a star. A star is born with that indefinable extra something.

In the silence of night I have often wished for just a few words of love from one man, rather than the applause of thousands of people.

No one has been a greater advocate for the power of love in this world than I; both in my life and in my music.

I’ve been in love with audiences all my life, and I’ve tried to please. I hope I did.

I’m a work in progress, but if I know in my heart that I’m doing my best, that my heart’s in the right place, that I have unconditional love, I feel okay.

Soon the sun beams will smile through. Before you jump out of that bed, just know, the thought of you was the first thing that hit my head.

You are my lover, you’re my best friend. You’re in my soul.

I love photography and first editions. I have that in my genes. My father was an archivist.