Who I am really keeps surprising me.

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.

Schools should be integrated by race and by class.

Rage is to writers what water is to fish.

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

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.

You do what you can with what you have. You have to work the edges whatever they are. The main thing is keeping your integrity.