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

Black Americans should be given credit for finding probably the perfect weapon; the weapon of the song. And that song continues. Most holocausts don't, so they have this bitterness left over. The phenomenon of the world, as far as Black Americans are considered, is that we are not a bitter people.

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.

Schools should be integrated by race and by class.

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.

You're only as good as your last book.

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