Poet

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

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.

Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow.

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.

One of the great needs of Negro children is to have books about themselves and their lives that can help them be proud.

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.

When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people - the beauty within themselves.

I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.

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.

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

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!'

Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.

Writing is like travelling. It's wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying.

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.

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 writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.

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.

Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.