In your 20s, you learn. In your 30s, you earn.
I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.
We don't ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.
Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.
We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.
Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.
Most of my actor friends dont believe its possible to let go of it and be happy, and for a while that was true for me. For the first two years I ached, every day. And I had such bad dreams. But then I made the decision to start working on my little shop and all that went away.
[Long Island] is buoyant, it's on the outskirts of Manhattan, and so they have access to phenomenal restaurants.
For centuries the word 'nature' has been used to bolster prejudices or to express, not reality, but a state of affairs that the user would wish to see.
There's a desire for me in the work, even when I'm looking at the past, to be looking from the present. It's to be here now. It's looking in the present tense.