“Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it.”

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

Road’s in front o’ me, Nothin’ to do but walk.

I’m so tired of waiting, aren’t you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

When a man starts out to build a world, He starts first with himself

Whiskey just naturally likes me but beer likes me better.

For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn’t write anything.

The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.

I dream a world… where wretchedness will hang its head and joy, like a pearl, attends the needs of all mankind. Of such I dream, my world!

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.

When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

Hang yourself, poet, in your own words. Otherwise, you are dead.

Out of love, No regrets– Though the goodness Be wasted forever. Out of love, No regrets– Though the return Be never.

Pleasured equally In seeking as in finding, Each detail minding, Old Walt went seeking And finding.

It’s fun once in a while to do a serious part but I really enjoy doing comedy because I love to laugh.

I enjoy making people laugh. The trick is to tell them jokes against yourself. If you praise yourself, your stories aren’t funny.

If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.

Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another.

In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.

The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that’s laughable is vanity.

I tell the boy in my class that no means no and he laughs in my face – says no means change my mind.

Some guys may play around and say a couple of things, but if I say it, I mean it. I may laugh, it may be funny, but if I say I’m going to get you, I’m going to get you.