The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet

The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se.

I am the history of the rejection of who I am

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think

In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.