Poems List

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

in New York Review of Books 7 January 1971 ‘Open Letter to my Sister, Angela Davis’

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.

in Esquire May 1961 ‘Black Boy looks at the White Boy’

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

Nobody Knows My Name (1961) ‘Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a letter from Harlem’

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.

Nobody Knows My Name (1961) ‘Notes for a Hypothetical Novel’

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.

Nobody Knows My Name (1961) ‘Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a letter from Harlem’

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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The hardest thing about writing, in a sense, is not writing. I mean, the sentence is not intended to show you off, you know. It is not supposed to be “Look at me!” “Look, no hands!” It’s supposed to be a pipeline between the reader and you. One condition of the sentence is to write so well that no one notices that you’re writing.

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