Middle age is when you’ve met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
Category Archive: 1902
We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.
I believe firmly that in making ethical decisions, man has the prerogative of true freedom of choice.
The cow is of the bovine ilk; one end is moo, the other milk.
There is a weapon we can fight with. That is the weapon of political action.
I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature.
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.
I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows – except us – that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.
It’s such a Bore Being always Poor.
Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul – the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.