Frosting Freedom Is just frosting On somebody else's Cake-- And so must be Till we Learn how to Bake.

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.

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.

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.

To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.

My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.