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.

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

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.

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

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.

A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers.

We Create God, Mankind's Nature.

to want any woman so badly was unwise, let alone his enemy's daughter." An Artful Seduction

Boxing is a mental sport. Think of a prizefight as a chess game of mind and body, and you are a little closer to it than if you compare it to a bloody brawl in an alley.

I try not to confuse roles and traits in my own life. Being the Perl god is a role. Being a stubborn cuss is a trait.

Against a diseased imagination demonstration goes for nothing.

As long as we have some definite idea about or some hope in the future, we cannot really be serious with the moment that exists right now.

To have ideas is to gather flowers; to think is to weave them into garlands.

Only those who must bear the consequences of a decision have the right to make it.

Arabic is the language of the Qur'an, but Arab culture is not the culture of Islam.