“As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.”

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.

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!

How can one conceive of a one-party system in a country that has over two hundred varieties of cheese?

Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.

As we’ve focused more on our food and where it comes from, people now have greater awareness of what’s being put onto our food, pesticides, labeling issues, and consumer health.

How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?

I pride myself in figuring out how to elevate a dish with a little preserved lemon or, then, a sprinkle of Maldon salt.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

I grew up with that farm-to-table dining before it was sweeping the nation. I do think there’s some value to really throwing yourself into food and embracing where it comes from.

Prana is more powerful than just about anything – food, exercise, skin creams, and Spanx.