I’m working at trying to be a Christian, and that’s serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend,...

I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like...

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‘Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.’...

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his...

Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the...

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

I want all my senses engaged. Let me absorb the world’s variety and uniqueness.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it change your attitude. Don’t complain

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

A wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.

I’m just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.

One of my lungs is half gone, and the other half, because I smoked for years, has a lesion. So I can’t swim anymore and had the swimming pool covered over. Now it’s what I...

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form...

I got my own back.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‘Here I am, read me.’ Over time...

No,nobody but nobody can make it out her alone.

Wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now.

I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition–about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring, still.

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to...

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

Life loves the liver of it.

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and...

I’m considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I’ve never been bored in...

Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

I like chicken a lot because chicken is generous – that is to say, it’s obedient. It will do whatever you tell it to do.

When I cook for my family on Christmas, I make feijoada, a South American dish of roasted and smoked meats like ham, pork, beef, lamb, and bacon – all served with black beans and rice....

The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black...

All great achievements require time.

There were people who went to sleep last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. And those dead folks would give anything at all for just five minutes...

The customs are as formalised as an eighteenth-century minuet, and a child at the race’s knee learns the moves and twirls by osmosis and observation.

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men… We are who we are because they were who they were. It’s wise to know where you come from, who called...

I work very hard, and I play very hard. I’m grateful for life. And I live it – I believe life loves the liver of it. I live it.

If you want what you’re saying heard, then take your time and say it so that the listener will actually hear it. You might save somebody’s life. Your own, first.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I...

One of the wonderful things about Oprah: She teaches you to keep on stepping.

That’s the biggest gift I can give anybody: ‘Wake up, be aware of who you are, what you’re doing and what you can do to prevent yourself from becoming ill.’

I created myself. I have taught myself so much.

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.

Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.

Sister, there are people who went to sleep all over the world last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. Sister, those who expected to rise did not,...

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you...

I’m grateful to intelligent people. That doesn’t mean educated. That doesn’t mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call ‘mother wit’ means intelligence that you had in your mother’s womb....

If we accept being talked to any kind of a way, then we are telling ourselves we are not quite worth the best. And if we have the effrontery to talk to anybody with less...

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.