My greatest blessing has been the birth of my son. My next greatest blessing has been my ability to turn people into children of mine.

It is a no-fail, incontrovertible reality: If you get, give. If you learn, teach. You can’t do anything with that except do it.

I was very blessed to have family and friends, but particularly family, who told me I was not only all right, I was just right, so I believe that my brain is a good one,...

If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don’t be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning ‘Good morning’ at total strangers.

I want to thank you, Lord, for life and all that’s in it. Thank you for the day and for the hour, and the minute.

To those who are given much, much is expected.

I believe that the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity is daring to dare.

Few, if any, survive their teens

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other...

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did....

I know that I’m not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear,...

I know for sure that loves saves me and that it is here to save us all.

I did work in a strip club, but I didn’t strip. I danced, and I became very popular.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and...

People will forget what you saidPeople will forget what you didBut people will never forget how you made them feel.

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.

All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us all that we are more alike than we are unlike.

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

The devil lives in our mistakes, the lord lives in our rights. Who lives in our ignorance, and who wins after all?

Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps...

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...

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.

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.

All great achievements require time.

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.