I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration.

The music is in minors.

I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.

With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

... sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.