“In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent. This is precisely the time when artists go to work.”

You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn’t even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.

Love is never any better than the lover.

You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

You are your best thing.

I didn’t want to speak for black people. I wanted to speak to and to be among. It’s us.

I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

Lonely was much better than alone.

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.

There are thousands of very, very talented artists who will never be known, even after they are dead.

When I say be creative I don’t mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.

I think there’s an artist hidden at the bottom of every single one of us.

Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.

I always knew I was gonna be an artist. I was very confident in that.

It is hard to separate the art from the artist.

My painting carries with it the message of pain.