Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

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.

I felt very bad in Washington. . . I didn't like my job, and I didn't know what was going to happen to me, and I was cold and half-hungry, so I wrote a great many poems.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

To some people Love is given, To others Only Heaven.