I think one of the nicest things that we created as a generation was just the fact that we could say, 'Hey, I don't like white people.'

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

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.

Writers ... I think ... live on that fine line between insanity and genius.

We [Black people] have always used our creativity to battle and we're not the only ones. Black Americans are certainly leaders in that simply because we were denied education and dealt with enforced illiteracy. But people seem to always forget that literacy is not the only way of learning things or conveying knowledge.

The unwillingness to try is worse than any failure.

My main strength as a young writer was that I had no fear of making mistakes. I knew I would and I knew I could and would learn from them.