Langston Hughes
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.Collection: Beauty
Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.Collection: Humor
Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow.Collection: Dreams
Violent anger makes me physically ill.Collection: Anger
Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people - the beauty within themselves.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Relationship
One of the great needs of Negro children is to have books about themselves and their lives that can help them be proud.Collection: Great
Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.Collection: Life
In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.Collection: Life
To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!'Collection: Change
Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.Collection: Humor
Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Teacher
I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.Collection: Life
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.Collection: Fear
An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Work
My personal experience has been that in my 25 years of writing, I have not been asked to do more than four or five commercial one-shot scripts. These were performed on major national hook-ups but produced for me no immediate additional jobs or requests. One script for BBC was done around the world with an all-star cast.Collection: Experience
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode?
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.
I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.
I will not take 'but' for an answer.
It's such a Bore Being always Poor.
We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.
Even the 'Negro' shows like 'Amos and Andy' and 'Beulah' are written largely by white writers - the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine.
Writing is like travelling. It's wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying.
Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art.
I must never write when I do not want to write.
My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong.
The Jewish people and the Negro people both know the meaning of Nordic supremacy. We have both looked into the eyes of terror.
Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their 'white' culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work.
I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.
My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.
The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you'll finish it.Collection: Done
I'm so tired of waiting, aren't you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?Collection: Beautiful
When a man starts out to build a world, He starts first with himselfCollection: Men
I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.Collection: Freedom
I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I'll be at the table When company comes. Nobody'll dare Say to me, "Eat in the kitchen," Then. Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed-- I, too, am America.Collection: Beautiful
Reach Up Your Hand... and take a star.Collection: Stars
Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe.Collection: Equality
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? ... Or does it explode?Collection: Love
Negroes - Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind: Beware the day - They change their mind.Collection: Sweet
Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it ... what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh. Humor is your own unconscious therapy. Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air, and you.Collection: Summer
The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow.Collection: Past
A dream deferred is a dream denied.Collection: Dream
Good morning, Revolution: You're the very best friend I ever had. We gonna pal around together from now onCollection: Inspirational