Langston Hughes Quotes

Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow.

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.

Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

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

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

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.

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

Violent anger makes me physically ill.

Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people – the beauty within themselves.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like ‘Tristan,’ goat’s milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike ‘Aida,’ parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.