Langston Hughes Quotes

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

Violent anger makes me physically ill.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I swear to the Lord, I still can’t see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.

Writing is like travelling. It’s wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying.

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.

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

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.