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.

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.

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.

Appreciation is the best currency to encourage someone do something for humanity.

You don't have to, Henry. In here, I think my dream is big enough for the both of us.

If you're going into a very dark place, then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything. If you don't want to see, why in God's name would you dare the dark at all?

You going to be a scientist when you grow up?” That sort of question deserved a blank stare, which it got.

The good man is the friend of all living things.

All of a sudden, you have this newborn you have no training for. It's frightening.

Part of standup is being loose and having a good time yourself and that translates to the audience.

Rock and roll is a nuclear blast of reality in a mundane world where no-one is allowed to be magnificent.

Can you still have any famous last words if you're somebody nobody knows?

And no relationship is perfect, ever. There are always some ways you have to bend, to compromise, to give something up in order to gain something greater.