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

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.

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.

God created the institution of marriage for mutual happiness and pleasure.

Sanity exists only in books, while Insanity rules our lives!

Time falls on us, like rain, it falls like rain until we drown in it, and sometimes, it's like the drains overflow, and time just - pools up, it seeps, it gathers in the corners.

Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as ravens claws.

We are not only a civilization of amateur photographers; we are amateur curators, editors, and publishers.

I was probably the one who tattled on the class clown. To get in good with the teachers.

a self-made martyr is a poor thing.

It is not lost on me that I'm spending my honeymoon at Comic Con.

The thought of a limit to perceptual space and time staggers the mind.

All of my songs are autobiographical.