The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.

We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.

Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.

Overall, white men run America. From nuclear armaments to the filth and jeopardy of New York City subways to the cruel mismanagement of health care, is there anything to boast about?

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

To tell the truth is to become beautiful.

If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then - I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn't, luckily, have to bother about that.

Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs.

Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details.

The fact that there was no catastrophic pandemic in recent history does not mean there won't be another one. And we are certainly not prepared for the next pandemic.

You know who you remind me of? The kid cop in Lethal Weapon 3. You know, the one who says, 'it's my twenty-first birthday today', and right away you know he's dead meat?

I like people more undone than made up. Patricia Arquette is the ultimate. She's not anorexic or perfectly tan, she's not trying to be anything but what she is, and that's the most sexy thing.

All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.