If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.

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

There is a man who exists as one of the most popular objects of leadership, legislation, and quasi-literature in the history of all men. . . . This man, that object of attention, attack, and vast activity, cannot make himself be heard, let alone understood. He has never been listened to. . . . That man is Black and alive in white America where the media of communication do not allow the delivery of his own voice, his own desires, his own rage.

... the histories of Blacks and Jews in bondage and out of bondage, have been blood histories pursued through our kindred searchings for self-determination. Let this blood be a stain of honor that we share. Let us not now become enemies to ourselves and to each other.

suicide is absolute, and if you think you will survive by hiding who you really are, you are sadly misled: there is no such thing as partial or intermittent suicide. You can only survive if you - who you really are - do survive.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language.

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.