The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry hearts.

I'm one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in.

In America, money takes the place of God.

Poor people who had escaped from poverty as I had, feared it, hated it and fled from it all their lives. Those born rich could afford to be touched by it.

Poverty was an ornament on a learned man like a red ribbon on a white horse.

As one of the dumb, voiceless ones I speak. One of the millions of immigrants beating, beating out their hearts at your gates for a breath of understanding.

The real thing creates its own poetry.