Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places.

You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from.

When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.

What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.

The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.

Art is the soul of a people.

The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos?

Sometimes the mind relives things very clearly for us...There are roads out of secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch others.

Painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself.

You don't paint what you see, you paint what you feel.

My purpose is to paint the life of my people as I know it.

If you want to double your happiness, pour it into someone else.

Of what use was memory anyway than as a template for one's most reassuring self-deceptions!

I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers.

I am the captain of my destiny, I do not abandon the ship in hard times, But, I do have sense enough not to go down with the ship.

I never give anyone just one congratulation. Congratulations are always plural. They are similar to grapes.

If I hadn't been a woman, I'd be a drag queen for sure. I like all that flair and I'd be dressing up in them high heels and putting on the big hair. I'd be like Ru Paul.

It is a curious property of research activity that after the problem has been solved the solution seems obvious.

to a Southerner it is faux pas, not sins, that matter in this world.

Let us never lose hope! God loves us always, even with our mistakes and sins.

Death is a greatly overrated experience. I hated Mother's and I'm not looking forward to my own. Apart from the sorrow there are the bills to be paid. Nobody dies for free.