To be friends with God means to pray with simplicity, like children talking to their parents.
Art is the soul of a people.
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.
Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places.
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.
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.
As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another.
Optimism is a muscle that gets stronger with use.
The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.
Solitude is pleasant. Loneliness is not.