Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

We don't ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.

Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

What can you do when you're condemned to a place where every choice seems wrong - even the one you promised your lover you'd make?

There is no liberty, save wisdom and self-control. Liberty is within--not without. It is each man's own affair.

The church is like Noah's ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you'll drown.

Friendship is love without his wings!

If we cannot meet our everyday surroundings with equanimity and pleasure and grow each day in some useful direction then ... life is on the road toward misfortune misery and destruction.

I found out how temperamental I am, yes. And that sometimes that can be kind of off-putting.

Most national advertising is done without justification. It is merely presumed to pay. A little test might show a way to multiply returns

Self-esteem is as necessary to the spirit as food is to the body.

I wanted to do an acting role in a movie that had nothing to do with the music business or in which I would play a singer or a songwriter. When I act, I don't even want to be thought of as Ne-Yo.

You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F.