Langston Hughes

“LIBERTY! FREEDOM! DEMOCRACY!True anyhow no matter how manyLiars use those words.”

“People up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.”

“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.”

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

“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”

“What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.”

“Though you may hear me holler,And you may see me cry--I'll be dogged, sweet baby,If you gonna see me die.”

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

“It's such a Bore Being always Poor.”

“Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas”

“I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.”

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

“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.”

“What happens to a dream deferred?”

“I must never write when I do not want to write.”

“Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.”