Aviation is poetry ... It's the finest kind of moving around, you know, just as poetry is the finest way of using words.

Sometimes I think no matter how one is born, no matter how one acts, there is something out of gear with one somewhere, and that must be changed. Life at its best is a grand corrective.

To be a colored man in America ... and enjoy it, you must be greatly daring, greatly stolid, greatly humorous and greatly sensitive. And at all times a philosopher.

I like Paris because I find something here, something of integrity, which I seem to have strangely lost in my own country. It is simplest of all to say that I like to live among people and surroundings where I am not always conscious of 'thou shall not.' I am colored and wish to be known as colored, but sometimes I have felt that my growth as a writer has been hampered in my own country. And so - but only temporarily - I have fled from it.

The Complex of color...every colored man feels it sooner or later. It gets in the way of his dreams, of his education, of his marriage, of the rearing of his children.

Biology transcends society.

Aviation is poetry ... It's the finest kind of moving around, you know, just as poetry is the finest way of using words.