I should not mistake her calm probing for the absence of anger.

I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible-that is precisely why they are so precious.

Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.

You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs, nor to the insidious activity of the streets.

To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.

You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.

My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.

Serious history was the West, and the West was white.

She had wanted her son to stand for what he believed and to be respectful. And he had died for believing his friends had a right to play their music loud, to be American teenagers.

I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories.

If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

We don’t have to like each other. We just need to respect each other.

There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.

He wasn’t a carrier of commitment-phobia or other notable boy diseases and he used expensive moisturizer. That’s about all it takes to bang my gong.

Easy enough to dismiss others' problems when you had none of your own.

That field hath eyen, and the wood hath ears.

It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business

You make music to move people and you don't get to pick who you move. You just don't. It's exclusionary and elitist and I just never felt that way about music, of all things. The great unifier.

We spend too much time hiding illness.

Poetry calls into question what it means to be human