Try, start always at home. This is my encouragement to all writers, start at home. All virtues and vices begin at home, and then spread abroad.

I am never proud to participate in violence, yet I know that each of us must care enough for ourselves that we can be ready and able to come to our own defence when and wherever needed.

Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.

You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right.

Never, never let a person know you're frightened. And a group of them ... absolutely never. Fear brings out the worst in everybody.

Courage, I don't think anybody is born with courage. I think you may be born with a flair to braggadocio, you know. That's not courage.

You may not get what you paid for, but you will pay for what you get.