The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

The world around me has changed, and I have learned to adapt but not change. But I’m changing into the woman I am meant to be.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

I’m a can-do girl.

Only those who want everything done for them are bored.

Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.

Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.

I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.

I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there’s no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That’s all crap.

I once wanted to prove myself by being a great actress. Now I want to prove that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll be a great actress.

This man is frank and earnest with women. In Fresno, he’s Frank and in Chicago he’s Ernest.

Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.

I read so much stuff that black women say, especially about my relationship. ‚Oh, he left his black wife to go be with some exotic chick.‘ First of all, my girl is black: she’s Jamaican.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles.

Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

I don’t think marriage is a civil right, but I think that being able to transfer property is a civil right.

I’m not a complete psychopath. Am I partially? Sure. I’ll accept that. But I’m not a complete psychopath.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

If a man reaches the heart of his own religion, he has reached the heart of the others, too. There is only one God, and there are many paths to him.

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

There are only two forces that unite men – fear and interest.

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

If you are a leader, you should never forget that everyone needs encouragement. And everyone who receives it – young or old, successful or less-than-successful, unknown or famous – is changed by it.

If you deny people their own voice, you’ll have no idea of who they were.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‚We’re black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.‘

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

People can try to reinvent themselves. I don’t think you can really change who you are, though, because who you are is pretty much where you came from and what you’ve done up to now.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

I can’t disguise myself with a wig and dark glasses – the wheelchair gives me away.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

India does not need to become anything else. India must become only India. This is a country that once upon a time was called the golden bird.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!

I was the first woman to burn my bra – it took the fire department four days to put it out.

I’m very picky; I’m never happy with anything. It’s so hard to give the record away and accept that you’re done.

My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.

Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.

We can continue to learn generation after generation and now is time to begin to learn how to love in a non-discriminatory way because we are intelligent enough, but we are not loving enough as a species.

Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.

I don’t think of poetry as a ‚rational‘ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

There’s no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively – I am one with the people.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries.

You can’t have it all, all at once. Who – man or woman – has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

I think it’s so important for girls to love themselves and to treat their bodies respectfully.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

I’m never going to be fast, and nobody will ever mistake me for being fast.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

I do believe in self-help.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.

People from all over the world come to London wanting to make their own mark on it, and they add to the energy and vitality of the capital. It’s got a bit busier since the ’60s, but the more the merrier!

I thought I would try to be gay for a while, but I’m just more sexually attracted to women. But I’m really glad that I found a few gay friends, because it totally saved me from becoming a monk or something.