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.

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!

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

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.

I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.

I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.