Poetry is life distilled.

Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.

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!

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.

I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.

People like definite decisions, / Tidy answers, all the little ravelings / Snipped off, the lint removed, they / Hop happily among their roughs / Calling what they can't clutch insanity / Or saintliness.