I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.

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

We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

Each body has its art.

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

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.

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don't pay attention 'cause it probably has floated into somebody else's head.