When you know my love, my love will warm you.

We both grew up in the atmosphere of struggle, both Ossie and me, ... I come out of Harlem and Harlem comes out of me - wailing police sirens and street parties, rumors and landlords, that cultural, spiritual scene. And Ossie came up from the South, where struggle and dying were part of everyday life. That is who we are.

You meet all kinds of people that help put life in perspective and turn the horror into some kind of lesson or avenue of awakening that lives with you all your days.

My dream was I was going to be an actor. Racism occurred to me. It dawned on me that I would not be an actor. It occurred to me that I was not white. It occurred to me that being what they call colored, being a Negro, was some kind of a disadvantage.

The kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within - strength, courage, dignity.

That we arrived at fifty years together is due as much to luck as to love, and a talent for knowing, when we stumble, where to fall, and how to get up again.

My mother - my stepmother, really, she herself have been what they call an elocutionist. And she was the one who first encouraged me to write poetry, because she used to read it to us. And then when I began to write when I was nine years old, my first poem was published in the Amsterdam News. I called it "The Graveyard."