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

In law school they teach you that everything is a contract; well, in poetry everything is a narrative.

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

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.

Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying.

I knew Stokely [Carmichael] and them, but when you got to that, you saw that Nina Simone started to take up their burden. She started to preach for them. She was taking on the burden of "I want to tell the people."

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.