Nikki Giovanni Quotes

We eat up artists like there's going to be a famine at the end.

She knows who she is, because she knows who she isn't.

Art offers sanctuary to everyone willing to open their Hearts as well as their Eyes.

The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.

I am ever fascinated by the human experience and by, actually, human beings.

We are better than we think and not yet what we want to be.

Life is a marvelous, transitory adventure.

Follow your image as far as you can no matter how useless you think it is. Push yourself.

You must invent your own games and teach us old ones how to play.

[To write poems] I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.

No one needs to teach you to be mean; we need to be taught to be kind.

Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt.

If i can't have what i want . . . then my job is to want what i've got and be satisfied that at least there is something more to want

I have not tried to tell the people anything. I have shared my views with the people but I have not tried to lead or correct them, assuming they need correction.

We all have our muses. My grandmother and my mother are the people I write for. I'll never have to worry about who buys my work, or who likes it, and who doesn't. The people who I want to be proud of me already are.

The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.

Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.

If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.

Libraries...house our dreams.

I'm glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility. (U.S. poet and writer, 1943- )

Hip-hop is a cultural expression - it's embracing.

White people really deal more with God and black people with Jesus.

My work is a part of me and I know it. I have no reason to try to pick one part of me out from the rest. I only see my work, or rather I should say I see my work only telling my part of the human experience.

BEFORE YOU JUMP OFF A BRIDGE OR HANG YOURSELF OR BE UNHAPPY PLEASE CONSIDER: LIVE FOR YOURSELF; THOSE WHO HATE YOU HAVE NO PURCHASE

It's really just interesting to ask: why not? And see where that takes me.

Everyone understands that love comes in many different packages and is used in many different ways. You cannot love beyond your years, nor can you fail to love beneath them... In other words, I think you get the love you need when you open your heart.

A lot is yet to be enjoyed. I'd like to stomp grapes for wine. Go to Antarctica. Have dinner with Venus Williams who is the greatest tennis player ever.

Poetry is the most informative of all of the arts because everything comes down to poetry. No matter what it is we are describing, ultimately we use either a metaphor; or we say "that's poetry in motion." You drink a glass of wine and say, "that's poetry in a bottle." Everything is poetry, so I think we come down to emotional information. And that's what poetry conveys.

Mistakes are a fact of life. If you are willing to be wrong then you have earned the right to be right.

History is wonderful. We have so much we can learn if we would quit making ideology out of history, and just deal with what happened.

I appreciate and enjoy my age.

There're two people in the world that are not likeable: a master and a slave.

Young people coming up who are having difficulty with their so-called celebrity need to get back into their lives. It's your life and you can't let the fact that you do something pretty good take away the joy of it.

I would put books on par with chocolate, because a good book is delicious.

Black Poetry is not for Black People...it is for everybody

I try to impress upon my students the importance of looking, listening... paying attention, in other words. You must pay attention.

For most of my life, I've thought of myself as pretty cool.

Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

Black love is black wealth

I move on feeling and have learned to distrust those who don't.

And you will understand all too soon That you, my children of battle, are your heroes

What's the difference between dragging a black man behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, and beating a white boy to death in Wyoming because he's gay?

I used to dream militant dreams of taking over america to show these whitefolks how it should be done i used to dream radical dreams of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers of correct analysis i even used to think that i'd be the one to stop the riot and negotiate the peace then i awoke & dug that if i dreamed natural dreams of being a natural woman doing what a woman does when she's natural i would have a revolution.

It's not a ladder we're climbing, it's literature we're producing. . . . We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people.

Poetry is like air. It's one of the necessary things. Everyone benefits from poetry. And as you know, poetry is international. There are only two things that are truly international, poetry and wine.

I’ve not learned the acceptable way of saying you fascinate me...I’ve not even learned how to say I like you without frightening people away-

We are less lonely when we connect. Art is connection.