Standing to America, bringing home black gold, black ivory, black seed.

As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.

I believe it's true that one person can make a difference. But how much more difference 100 people make, or rather 99.

We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.

This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth.

[My poetry is] a way of coming to grips with reality . . . a way of discovery and definition. It is a way of solving for the unknowns.

As well have a talon as a finger, a muzzle as a mouth, as well have a hollow as a heart.

Your presence was shore where I rested/ released from the hoodoo of that dance, where I spoke/ with my true voice again.

Harriet Tubman, woman of earth, whipscarred, a summoning, a shinning

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fire blazes. No one ever thanked him.

I grew up reading the newspapers, mostly the sports section. I was a wrestler and would check to see if I was ranked.

It is the mark of the cultured man that he is aware of the fact that equality is an ethical and not a biological principle

Only two of my personalities are schizophrenic, but one of them is paranoid and the other one is out to get him. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

I am playing the music I love and I really play it from my heart, and whatever the out form is - it doesn't matter whether it's art or music.

Surviving the first round is never my aim. Ideally, I'd be in one group with Brazil, Argentina and Germany. Then I'd have lost two rivals after the first round. That's how I think. Idealisitic.

My parents separated when I was eight. I grew up with my mom alone.

Eminem. My son was listening to that and I was like, “What is that junk?” Then I started listening and I thought, You know, that kid is pretty good. It's the storytelling.

Do we mean love, when we say love?

You get to keep acting on the feelings you had just moments before. You don't have to psych yourself up for the scene. You can just go off what you were already feeling.

Europeans believe in democracy - or, at least, in republican government - but they have considered the alternatives, and continue to do so, and that scandalizes Americans.