Gil Scott-Heron Quotes

In all fields black consciousness seeks to talk to the black man in a language that is his own

When I was a teenager, black pride became newly popular again. Suddenly a lot of black people were wearing the fake kente cloth and red black and green and Bob Marley. That was sort of my window into finding my own identity as a black person.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

Artists in each of the arts seek after and care for nothing but love.

I was brought up feeling that art is a very important part of one's life. It's something that I not only enjoy, it's something I can share with others.

Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live.

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

Some people like to paint trees. I like to paint love. I find it more meaningful than painting trees.

The arts are a major life nourishment.

The question of truth is forever in the air, and people look for it with particular fervor in art.

Being honest is my job. That's what music is for me.

The real message of the Dance opens up the vistas of life to all who have the urge to express beauty with no other instrument than their own bodies, with no apparatus and no dependence on anything other than space.

Art is about expressing the true nature of the human spirit in whatever way one wishes to express it. If it is honest, it is beautiful. If it is not honest, it is obvious.

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

I think it's natural for a creative to be sensitive. If I'm in the studio and I write something, I think it's the greatest thing in the world; it's like my baby. I just made something out of thin air that exists now in a tangible form. It's the biggest thrill in my life.

If you kill the arts, you kill love, and you kill progress.

I'm a writer. My job is to speak what - that which I think is true. If that bridges the gap, that's good. If it doesn't, that's too bad.

I had to get to the point where I just had to embrace carrying the torch for the traditional girls out there. I love representing the traditional black woman.

Art is truth.

I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.

I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

When I think of Afropunk, I think of the best of the best. I think of, like, D'Angelo.

I love being black.