This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas

If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who's coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.

I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.

Never look for a worm in the apple of your eye.

Melting pot Harlem-Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.