We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

We don't ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.

Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.

Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

Sweet wine makes drunk, sour wine (insult) is "tetelestai". Life is not about what we have done and become, but how God to be fully glorified.

If you don't break your own standards, you will not reach new heights and levels. It is by stretching our limits that we move beyond boundaries. Keep improving!

People from different cultures have different definitions for beauty. Isn't that sad to judge others with our standards... rather than appreciate them?

I believe in a world of possibilities.

Each one of us requires the spur of insecurity to force us to do our best.

Genius has no age, no country, no race; it belongs to mankind.

Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch.

Destiny urges me to a goal of which I am ignorant. Until that goal is attained I am invulnerable, unassailable. When Destiny has accomplished her purpose in me, a fly may suffice to destroy me.

When digital recording came in about '84, everything started to follow into digital. Now, you've got the best recording media in the world, but it's not very pleasing to the ear.

I can't describe it, what I'm feeling and what I'm thinking. This means something. This is important.