Columnist Quotes

“Money and art are far apart.”

“Summer was made to give you a taste of what hell is like. Winter was made for landladies to charge high rents and keep cold radiators and make a fortune off of poor tenants.”

“Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear.”

“America never was America to me And yet I swear this oath - America will be!”

“Through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying. When my grandmother died, I didn't cry, either. Something about my grandmother's stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything."”

“To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.”

“Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia, and that the Jewish people's problems were worse than ours.”

“Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.”

“When a man starts out to build a world, He starts first with himself”

“While over Alabama earth These words are gently spoken: Serve and hate will die unborn. Love and chains are broken.”

“Life is a system of half-truths and lies, Opportunistic, convenient evasion.”

“The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night And I love the rain.”

“A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.”

“My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.”

“When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.”

“My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.”

“There is no color line in art.”

“I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.”

“Peace We passed their graves: The dead men there, Winners or losers, Did not care. In the dark They could not see Who had gained The victory.”

“I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.”

“If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who's coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.”

“The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow.”

“I do not want no pretty woman. First thing you know, you fall in love with her-then you got to kill somebody about her. She'll make you so jealous, you'll bust!”

“Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed -Let it be that great strong land of loveWhere never kings connive nor tyrants schemeThat any man be crushed by one above.”

“What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?”