Saul Williams
For all the ghosts and corpses that shall never know the breath of our children so long for the sacrifice and endurance of our mothers and the sustained breath of our fathers we liveCollection: Mother
I think everything has its place. So if the ideas or the fluidity isn't coming in writing, maybe it's related to ingestions.Collection: Writing
It was always important to me to be that kid who could rock the party as well as rock the English professor's mind.Collection: Party
I think it's misleading to think that art is only there for escapism, only there for our dreams of being rich and f - king whoever we wanna f - k.Collection: Dream
When I can feel you breathing into me i, like a stone gargoyle atop some crumbling building, spring to life a resuscitated angel.Collection: Spring
There is a lot of fun to be had when you try and fit as many words as you can within a three-minute song, but there is also a lot of fun in trying to get that message across in three words, or better yet when the music can overpower the words and convey something really pure and perfect that affects our psycho-emotional space.Collection: Song
American culture is often so self-consumed that we often think that our problems are just our problems.Collection: Thinking
A lie preserved in stained glass doesn't make it more true.Collection: Lying
I hear the weed is really strong in California.Collection: Weed
When I wake up in the morning, the first things that I see are the clouds. They're right there. I look out my window now and there's always, always a black bird of some sort on the ledge there. Usually I wake up and look at the birds.Collection: Morning
It's not the rules everywhere, you know? That's not the rules everywhere - that things have to be dumbed down in order to become massively popular. And that hasn't always been the rule, even in America.Collection: Order
The role that theater has placed in enhancing consciousness and moving systems ahead. I think of what South African theater meant for the apartheid movement, for example. I think of what music has meant for so many social movements across time.Collection: Moving
I spend my time sitting in train stations, parks, parking lots, cafes, just looking at people - eavesdropping, basically. I'm vulnerable to all of it.Collection: People
There's so much to be found in literature, especially if you don't have the money to travel or the means to get out of your neighborhood or get off work.Collection: Mean
Books are carefully folded forests/void of autumn/bound from the sunCollection: Book
I can't say that I always want to get out of bed, you know.Collection: Bed
It's crazy when you see very little reflection between what's played on the radio and what people are talking about in the streets. It lets you know how far off we are from a real movement.Collection: Crazy
I have a very family-like connection to hip-hop, which is why it frustrates me so much.Collection: Hip Hop
I was fed by the music I listened to as a kid. Hip-hop fed me psychologically, spiritually, politically. I learned from that music.Collection: Kids
I'm a very sensitive person at times. Not just to words that anybody says, but in relationships for example, the people that you open up to, you listen to, you hear - you know? So a lot of times, the key to some of my vulnerability is just through things, simple things - or critiques or whatever - or could be very simple things that are said.Collection: Simple
I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does writtenCollection: Thinking
Come, my love, we have oceans to sail.Collection: Ocean
I keep trying to forget, but I must remember. And gather the scattered continents of a self, once whole. Before they plant flags and boundary my destiny. Push down the watered mountains that blemish this soiled soul before the valleys of my conscience get the best of me. I'll need a passport just to simply reach the rest of me. A vaccination for a lesser god's bleak history.Collection: Destiny
I don't really believe in writer's block or anything like that. If I'm not feeling words, I may pick up an instrument and play with sounds or delve into different types of creativity and expression.Collection: Block
The music aids the message, it's there to punctuate and abbreviate and shape the silenceCollection: Silence
Half of the popcorn sh-t that's out there, we know it's popcorn. But we're like, "It's my guilty pleasure." I feel like we have more guilty pleasure than actual f - kin' pleasure.Collection: Popcorn
Сommercial hip-hop is not youth rebellion, not when the heroes of hip-hop like Puffy are taking pictures with Donald Trump and the heroes of capitalism - you know that's not rebellion. That's not "the street" - that's Wall Street.Collection: Wall
Vulnerability is power.Collection: Vulnerability
the greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to dieCollection: Past
Music has always pushed ahead social movements and can do much more than just dumb down a populace.Collection: Dumb
she kissed as if she, alone, could forge the signature of the sunCollection: Signatures
i laced my shoes with sorrow and walked a weary road dead end streets don't come undone with double knots wing tipped shoes that walk on air through vacant lotsCollection: Air
I think that heartbreak is a good thing.Collection: Thinking
Dying is something you have no control over. Why waste your life being afraid of it?Collection: Death
I feel that people need to be jolted out of their comfort zones.Collection: People
I think everybody on this planet does that - trying to capture your dream after you wake up.Collection: Dream
I used to have weird practices in crowded used-book stores in New York where I'd go in and just stomp my foot and see what fell from the shelf. And of course, because it's an unexpected encounter, there's always some magic that comes from it.Collection: New York
i am like a survivor of the flood walking through the streets drenched with God surprised that all of the drowned victims are still walking and talkingCollection: Talking
I have offered myself to the inkwell of the wordsmith that I might be shaped into new terms of being.Collection: Might
They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my loveCollection: Sea
We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didnt walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.Collection: Race
Fax me a fact and I'll telegram a hologram or telephone the son of man and tell him he is done. Leave a message on his answering machine telling him there are none. God and I are one. Times moon. Times star. Times sun. The factor is me. You remember me.Collection: Stars
I'm usually trying to get back into the dream or analyzing the dream. And yeah, the days, most days begin like that.Collection: Dream
I'm somewhat of an empath, I would say. I relate easily to ideas and stories, books, films, music. I'm moved by all of these things. Art in general. But not just art, you know?Collection: Art
Art itself is underserved when we don't realize the power of it.Collection: Art
You start to realize connections between experiences and things that push your buttons, and things that have touched you in those vulnerable areas and what-have-you. And they form a little collection over time - at least I do - and as time progresses and new things are learned, you kind of sift through those things until they're air or danceable, you know? But they start as this thing that's either too hard or too soft to dance to.Collection: Air
You change the beat up, you might change the way people dance to the music. If you change the way they move, maybe they'll think about it differently.Collection: Moving
If not then you must be trying to hear us and in such cases we cannot be heard. We remain in the darkness, unseen. In the center of unpeeled bananas, we exist. Uncolored by perception. Clothed to the naked eye. Five senses cannot sense the fact of our existence. And that's the only fact. In fact, there are no facts.Collection: Eye
Jay Z and President Bush have a lot in common, that same brash confidenceCollection: President