OK, boss, I don't mind shuffling, but I won't scratch my head.

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."

Revolutionaries don't get job security. They compete with rats for cheese and with strays for shelter--after the big bullets make feet out of their knees.

I never thought about myself as an activist when we were coming along. I wasn't a joiner. You know, I love the people I love. I didn't care whether - they could be a Democrat, Republican, communist, you know, and anything but a racist.

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.

That's what being young is all about. You have the courage and the daring to think that you can make a difference. You're not prone to measure your energies in time. You're not likely to live by equations.

It takes a long time to really be married. One marries many times at many levels within that marriage. If you have more marriages than you have divorces within the marriage, you’re lucky and you stick it out.