There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call 'the breaks.

The truth is... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else.

I was reared in the conservative atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage.

If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.

What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang?

We shall not always plant while others reap

The key to all strange things is in thy heart..../ My spirit has come home, that sailed the doubtful seas.

My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.

We were not made to eternally weep.

Dame Poverty gave me my name, And Pain godfathered me.

For we must be one thing or the other, an asset or a liability, the sinew in your wing to help you soar, or the chain to bind you to earth.

I want words at my funeral. But I guess that means you need life in your life.

The Prayer that precedes all other prayer is, may the real me meet the real you.

We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time.

...your antagonist is a hero in their own mind... p.192

The dirty laundry of our confessed sin belongs in the Lord’s laundry hamper

Baseball was a dream I gathered more splinters than hits.

Happiness, at my age, is breathing

It was like hiking into a Hemingway story; everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext.

I was really kind of shy as a child. But I would do things for attention.

If there is something you must do and you cannot do it, you cannot do anything else.