Langston Hughes Quotations

Anyday, one can walk down the street in a big city and see a thousand people. Any photographer can photograph these people - but very few photographers can make their prints not only reproductions of the people taken, but a comment upon them - or more, a comment upon their lives - or more still, a comment upon the social order that creates these lives.

I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.

One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help.

Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-

I got the Weary Blues And I can't be satisfied.

Good evening, daddy! Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? Trilling the treble And twining the bass Into midnight ruffles Of cat-gut lace.

Both of them were very good and kind - the one who went to church and the one who didn't. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well.

When you turn the corner And you run into yourself Then you know that you have turned All the corners that are left.

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

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.