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

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

Dreams are like the paints of a great artist. Your dreams are your paints, the world is your canvas. Believing, is the brush that converts your dreams into a masterpiece of reality.

In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.

Oppression

Now dreams
Are not available
To the dreamers,
Nor songs
To the singers.

In some lands
Dark night
And cold steel
Prevail--
But the dream
Will come back,
And the song
Break
Its jail.

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.