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

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.

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

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.

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

Our habitual failure to recognise thought as thought, our habitual identification with discursive thought, is the primary source of human suffering.

He is able to put aside personal feelings and see the broad strokes. Experience counts in these things.

Be patient

My deep dark secret is that I was a nerd in school. I liked the theater. I liked to study. I wasn't very good at sports.

A fool and his money are soon elected.

The politician has no more use for pride than Falstaff had for honour.

God speaks through me.

I feel my immortality over sweep all pains, all tears, all time, all fears, - and peal, like the eternal thunders of the deep, into my ears, this truth, - thou livest forever!

Stand up to your obstacles and do something about them.

If you fall in love based on zero hours spent with me? That's maybe something to be aware of. That will fade fast. You can't be in love with a google search.