The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

Before ever meeting Priyanka Chopra, I had heard her name coming out of Bollywood and was impressed: she was beautiful, talented, had made nearly 50 movies, earned multiple awards – a massive star.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl’s complexion.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.

A poem is a naked person… Some people say that I am a poet.

Obama’s not Jesus. He can’t walk on water.

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

I wear make-up, and it gets a little bit thicker every year.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

In the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask, ‚why don’t I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden,‘ and they abandon their values.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

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.

A worthy woman personifies the truly noble and worthwhile attributes of life.

The beauty of me being on stage is I have a voice.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

My life is not unlike Truman’s. I can’t go anywhere.

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

Women have a certain sexuality, and I think their bodies are beautiful, and I’m not embarrassed to explore that in a film. But there are things you get offered that are vulgar and violent – just like there’s a side of me that’s vulgar and violent.

I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

I put cocoa butter all over my face and my iconic belly and my arms and legs. Why live rough? Live smooth.

Gospel music is never pessimistic, it’s never ‚oh my god, its all going down the tubes‘, like the blues often is.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.

If a woman can, by careful selection of a father and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen with efficient senses, sound organs and a good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

Beauty without expression is boring.

I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.

Water’s never clumsy.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

If you think you can slander a woman into loving you, or a man into voting for you, try it till you are satisfied.

A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

Apple’s market share is bigger than BMW’s or Mercedes’s or Porsche’s in the automotive market. What’s wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?

They might not need me; but they might. I’ll let my head be just in sight; a smile as small as mine might be precisely their necessity.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

Teach not thy lip such scorn, for it was made For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Science is a beautiful gift to humanity; we should not distort it.

Of life’s two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer’s hand.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

Africa is probably one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.