Langston Hughes Quotes

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.

The Jewish people and the Negro people both know the meaning of Nordic supremacy. We have both looked into the eyes of terror.

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?

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

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

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

When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

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

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

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

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

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.

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

Even the ‘Negro’ shows like ‘Amos and Andy’ and ‘Beulah’ are written largely by white writers – the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine.

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