“I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.”

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.

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.

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

The most important thing is, when I do give the music, I’m satisfied with it, that it speaks for what I want to do.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

Parents have to really talk to their children before they leave home.

Well, there’s not a day goes by when I don’t get up and say thank you to somebody.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

I have a very lively and colourful show. It’s two hours of hits and the music speaks for itself.

You can talk good ideas out of existence.