My grandmothers are full of memories, smelling of soap and onions and wet clay, with veins rolling roughly over quick hands, they have many clean words to say, my grandmothers were strong.

When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.

Love stretches your heart and makes you big inside.

I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to stand between my body's Southern song - the fusion of the South, my body's song and me.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

I have always secretly felt that what mankind should be in an ideal sense is that mixture of people and races. I really believe in it. I don't think there is anything sacred in the integrity of race, white or black.

I believe deeply in a common humanity. The black man belongs to the family of man. One part of that family is out of control - like a virus or cancer - and that is the white man. He and his technological society are bent on destroying the world. Everywhere the white man has gone with his empire, he has destroyed people, races, societies, cultures, and in the course of it, has sterilized himself. He is completely the mechanical man: without heart, without soul. He is the Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz. But I don't believe that all the white people in the world are no good.