Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop--you are a Negro! . . . Black is powerful.

There is no color line in art.

Teach us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth because I do not want it to fall on me-nor Thee-nor anybody living. Amen!

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.

Whiskey just naturally likes me but beer likes me better.

Rest at pale evening... A tall slim tree... Night coming tenderly Black like me

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.