Quotes from Langston Hughes

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.

Money and art are far apart.

I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.

I don't dare start thinking in the morning. I don't dare start thinking in the morning. If I thought thoughts in bed, Them thoughts would bust my head-- So I don't dare start thinking in the morning.

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

Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Pleasured equallyIn seeking as in finding, Each detail minding, Old Walt went seekingAnd finding.

Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.

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.

Good morning, daddy! Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? • • • • You think It's a happy beat?

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

Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you - / Then, it will be true.

Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.

Well, when Christ comes back this time, I hope He comes back mad His own self. I hope He drives the Jim Crowers out of their high places, every living last one of them from Washington to Texas.

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

Humor is when the joke's on you but hits the other fellow first -- before it boomerangs.

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

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

It's such a Bore Being always Poor.

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

O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.

Life is an egg you have to be patient and careful with it or it will break.

Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling.