The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you'll finish it.

Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Do you know that there are libraries in our country that will not stock a book by a Negro writer, not even as a gift? There are towns where Negro newspapers and magazines cannot be sold except surreptitiously. There are American magazines that have never published anything by Negroes. There are film studios that have never hired a Negro writer. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren?t it doesn?t matter.

I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.

I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.

I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes, but I laugh, and eat well, and grow strong.