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.

Summer was made to give you a taste of what hell is like. Winter was made for landladies to charge high rents and keep cold radiators and make a fortune off of poor tenants.

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.

Life dosent frighten me at all.

Hard as I try, daddy-o, I really do not like concert singers. They are always singing in some foreign language.

I went down to the river, I set down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn't, So I jumped in and sank.

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