Quote

I'm an old storyteller. I tell the story. It's about the story.

Nikki Giovanni

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Storyteller
Story
Tell
Stories

More quotes by Nikki Giovanni

Image
We just didn't put any pressure on each other, and I think that everybody needs somebody, and I didn't do it to try to do it it's what we [with Nina Simone] were to each other.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
I am so hip even my errors are correct
Nikki Giovanni
Image
A white face goes with a white mind. Occasionally a black face goes with a white mind. Very seldom a white face will have a black mind.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
If culture was a railroad, I can see the tracks running from the Spirituals to the Hip Hop Nation.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
Baseball is already the world's most tranquil sport. It is probably the only active sport where you are not seriously required to be alive to play.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
Floating to shore...riding a low moon...on a slow cloud.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
It's not a ladder we're climbing, it's literature we're producing. . . . We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
I don't have a life-style, I have a life.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
Rage is to writers what water is to fish.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
I am proud of the hip hop generation. They are good business people and, actually, good people. It's strange that the only time the major press talks about them is when someone gets killed or does drugs or something yet these are the same press people who made heroes out of the Mafia and other crooks, you know.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
I do not understand why any poet or writer would run for office that's a different sense of who you are. I'm just a poet. I am as truthful as I can be. That makes me an artist. I heed the people I do not lead the people.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
It's really just interesting to ask: why not? And see where that takes me.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
Death is a slave's freedom.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
School should be eleven months of the year.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
I think that too many strangers were in her [Nina Simone's] life, and not enough people that she knew and loved.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.
Nikki Giovanni
Image
I am ever fascinated by the human experience and by, actually, human beings.
Nikki Giovanni