This morning I paid seventy cents for two little old dried-up slivers of bacon and one cockeyed egg. It took me till noon to get my appetite back.

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.

The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.

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.

When I were a young man, I used to play baseball and steal bases just like Jackie Robinson. If the empire would rule me out, I would get mad and hit the empire.

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.

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.