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

This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.

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.

What shall I give my children? who are poor, / Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land...

Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

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!

I don't like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.