“In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.”

“Violent anger makes me physically ill.”

“Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewi...”

“An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.”

“Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people - the beauty within themselves.”

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white peopl...”

“I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it....”

“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the...”

“Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.”

“I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.”

“Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose...”

“I don't want to, in any way, characterize a race or a people or get accused of racial profiling, but the Irish, as lyrical and rom...”