The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.

You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from.

When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.

What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.

Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places.

Art is the soul of a people.

The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos?

Sometimes the mind relives things very clearly for us...There are roads out of secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch others.

Painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself.

You don't paint what you see, you paint what you feel.

My purpose is to paint the life of my people as I know it.

Secrets, ” Kohler finally said, “are a luxury we can no longer afford.

He who does not love his own language is worse than an animal and smelly fish.

It's gratifying that it does; I love to give readings.

No man suffers injustice without learning, vaguely but surely, what justice is.

For me, I think the only danger is being too much in love with guitar playing. The MUSIC is the most important thing, and the guitar is only the instrument.

The one certainty in tiger tracks is: follow them long enough and you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first.

Valentine's Day is my mother's birthday. If I'm wildly in love, I've sent people chicken hearts, which seems to appeal to the kind of person that I've been in love with.

When you're a story teller, you work out everything. You work out who these people are, what's going to be happening. The environment in which they live.

Now, Hillary's [Clinton] more than that, she's an actual - she could be a crime boss.

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.