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.

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.

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

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

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.

I'm a concert pianist. That's a pretentious way of saying I'm unemployed at the moment.

In France, older women are considered sensual, and they don't have to mask the lines and wrinkles and erase every sign of their life on earth to be attractive and get laid.

Things don't go away. They become you.

But alas! Like many another consummation devoutly to be wished, the actual performance was a disappointing one.

It's more like it is now than it ever has been.

I learned by reading an awful lot and by writing a half a million words of stuff nobody would do anything with except wrap old fish.

Boasting is the outward form of the inner condition of pride.

My mother spoke of Christ to my father, by her feminine and childlike virtues, and, after having borne his violence without a murmur or complaint, gained him at the close of his life to Christ.

As you care less about what people think of you, you will care more about what others think of themselves.

The worst thing you can do if you want to start a fight is to use derogatory terminology.