Langston Hughes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!'

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain-- All, all the stretch of these great green states-- And make America again!

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

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

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.

We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

There is no color line in art.

Rest at pale evening... A tall slim tree... Night coming tenderly Black like me

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.

7 x 7 + love = An amount Infinitely above: 7 x 7 - love.

Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? ... Or does it explode?

Lawrence has a wonderful hill in it, with a university on top and the first time I ran away from home, I ran up the hill and looked across the world: Kansas wheat fields and the Kaw River, and I wanted to go some place, too. I got a whipping for it.

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.