I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target

All literature is protest.

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.

Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.

I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.

Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!

Memories were fine but you couldn't touch them, smell them or hold them. They were never exactly as the moment was, and they faded with time.

I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima

Memory, when it juts, retreats, recovers, shows us how to hold the darkness, how to breathe.

In civil business; what first? boldness; what second and third? boldness: and yet boldness is a child of ignorance and baseness.

When you are engaged in both trying to kill and capture the enemy and get support from the local population, you have to be always asking yourself, "Is what I'm doing keeping that balance?"

Everything takes longer and costs more.

In terms of fiction, I'd rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.

Everything has already been said, but not yet by everyone.

If I can hit a curveball, why can't I hit a ball that is standing still on a course?

I have decided to be a poet. My father said there isn't a suitable career structure for poets and no pensions and other boring things, but I am quite decided.