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

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 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.

It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction.

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

First fight. Then fiddle.

Nothing could stop Mississippi.