Seek Patience And Passion In Equal Amounts.

I Find In My Poetry And Prose The Rhythms And Imagery Of The Best - I Mean, When I'm At My Best - Of The Good Southern Black Preachers. The Lyricism Of The Spirituals And The Directness Of Gospel Songs And The Mystery Of Blues Are In My Music Or In My Poetry And Prose, Or I Missed Everything.

The Autobiographer Looks At Life Through The Lens Of His Or Her Own Life And Really Uses Herself Or Himself As The Jumping-off Place To Examine The Social Mores And The Economic And Political Climates. In A Way, The Autobiography Becomes History As Well As The Story Of One Person, For It Becomes The Story Of A Family Or The Story Of The State Or Nation.

Hold Those Things That Tell Your History And Protect Them. During Slavery, Who Was Able To Read Or Write Or Keep Anything? The Ability To Have Somebody To Tell Your Story To Is So Important. It Says: 'i Was Here. I May Be Sold Tomorrow. But You Know I Was Here.'

Love Liberates. Love - Not Sentimentality, Not Mush - But True Love Gives You Enough Courage That You Can Say To Somebody, "don't Do That, Baby." And The Person Will Know You're Not Preaching But Teaching.

We Are All Creative, But By The Time We Are Three Of Four Years Old, Someone Has Knocked The Creativity Out Of Us. Some People Shut Up The Kids Who Start To Tell Stories. Kids Dance In Their Cribs, But Someone Will Insist They Sit Still. By The Time The Creative People Are Ten Or Twelve, They Want To Be Like Everyone Else.