Quoteikon Logo 251px

Nikki Giovanni Quotes

Nikki Giovanni
  • Mini Bio
  • Name: Yolande Nikki Giovanni
  • Born: 7th June 1943, Knoxville, Tennessee, U.S.
  • Occupation: Poet, writer and professor
  • Movies: She has appeared in 1 movie: Brooks People (2017) and one T.V series: The Poets' Cafe (1995)
  • Dream: Her dream from an early age was to become a writer
  • Vinyl: Nikki recorded 7 times to vinyl between 1976 and 2002
  • Trivia: Nikki was asked to give a speech at a memorial service with less than a days notice after the Virginia Tech shooting where she delivered a rousing poem entitled "We are Virginia Tech, We will prevail" it was lauded with great acclaim at the convocation and in worldwide media

"If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else"

Nikki Giovanni

"The world is not a pleasant place to be without someone to hold and be held by"

Nikki Giovanni

"We love because it's the only true adventure"

Nikki Giovanni

"Mistakes are a fact of life: It is the response to the error that counts"

Nikki Giovanni

"I am so hip even my errors are correct"

Nikki Giovanni

"Nothing is easy to the unwilling"

Nikki Giovanni

"Language is a gift, listening is a responsibility"

Nikki Giovanni

"Black love is black wealth"

Nikki Giovanni

"Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying"

Nikki Giovanni

"Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste"

Nikki Giovanni

"Once you know who you are, you don't have to worry anymore"

Nikki Giovanni

"The unwillingness to try is worse than any failure"

Nikki Giovanni

"You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts"

Nikki Giovanni

"We have a world to conquer, one person at a time; Starting with ourselves"

Nikki Giovanni

"We are better than we think and not yet what we want to be"

Nikki Giovanni
Scroll down for full bio and more great quotes

Great quotes are not where you find great wisdom. It's where you share this knowledge that counts

Sharing Is Caring

Nikki Giovanni Biography

Since she was a child Nikki Giovanni dared to dream that one day she would become a writer, even school sometimes obscured the path to achieving her ambitions. However the reality is that dreams do not come true because they are true and Nikki was always destined to become the great poet and writer she wished for, you see it was always inside her and she just had to discover how to unleash it.

From passion there is poetry and in the early days this led Nikki to write about what was around her, what she could see and was experiencing. This ignited the civil rights activist from within and resulted in her being labelled the Poet of the Black Revolution.

However getting published was not easy so she decided to publish her own material and soon enough the recognition started to come for her creative writing. The seed of her talent was beginning to grow and as the works continued so did the critical acclaim. Now she can proudly lay claim to authoring three New York Times best selling books which is seldom achieved by a poet and she has even been nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2004 for her Poetry Collection recorded on vinyl.

When she's not penning poems she is sharing her knowledge as a university professor of poetry at Virginia Tech and Oprah Winfrey has recognised her contribution to society by naming Nikki as one of Oprah's 25 living legends.

With some of her quotes being as interesting as her poetry it was highly enjoyable researching and listing my choice of 15 of the best Nikki Giovanni quotes"

Quotes About Nikki Giovanni

The novelist James Baldwin said in a 1971 discourse with Giovanni: "The danger of your generation, if I may say so … is to substitute one romanticism for another. Because these categories - to put it simply but with a certain brutal truth - these categories are commercial categories"

The poet Donald Luther Lee described her poetry thus: "Nikki writes about the familiar: what she knows, sees, experiences"


Nikki Giovanni quote