"If I'm the people's poet, then I..." - Quote by Maya Angelou

“This is my life. it is my one time to be me. i want to experience every good thing.”

“I've tried to be totally present, so that when I'm finished with a piece of work, I'm finished. ... The work, once completed, does not need me. The work I'm working on needs my total concentration. The one that's finished doesn't belong to me anymore. It belongs to itself.”

“Light and shadow are opposite sides of the same coin. We can illuminate our paths or darken our way. It is a matter of choice.”

“Acting is an animal thing, not an intellectual thing.”

“If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!”

“All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”

“The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.”

“When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.”

“Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.”