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.

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.

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.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

What alarms me most is the fact that, even when God has now raised up a voice to speak on these issues, many sincerely believe that I am in error or at worst that I am doing something utterly wrong

There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.

Florida will be gone altogether, the whole damned place, in not too long.

Chris Martin looks like a geography teacher.

You cannot be in the presence of God and be bored at the same time. For that matter, you cannot be in the will of God and be bored at the same time.

What's Cabin Nine?" Leo asked. "And I'm not a Vulcan!" "Come on, Mr. Spock, I'll explain everything.

Understanding is the ultimate seduction of the mind. Go to the truth beyond the mind.

War is not civilized.

Clearly the West Indies are going to play their normal game, which is what they normally do