Ishmael Reed Quotes (15 Quotes)


    Regardless of the criticisms I receive from the left, the right and the middle, I think it's important to maintain a prolific writing jab, as long as my literary legs hold up.

    I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.

    I challenged that and said that he hadn't read much. I mean, how can you make that superlative statement And he admitted he hadn't read much.

    Free enterprise is not a bad idea and has produced art.

    No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.


    Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

    I try to do what has never been done before.

    That kind of thing happens to black people every day in this country, and they don't receive that kind of sentence he did, which was to go to prison on the weekends; I think he lectured there-an outside lecturer.

    I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year.

    I saw Houston Baker, Jr., recently in Los Angeles. I don't bear any ill feelings toward him. In fact, he was very cordial toward me.

    Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.

    Those books are still in print, all the books I've written are still in print, but I heard that other people had been victimized also.

    Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.

    I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.

    We learn about one another's culture the same way we learn about sex in the streets.


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    Facts - Writing - Man - Imagination & Visualization - Economics - Books - Weekends - Obstacles - Literature - Countries - America - Poetry - Honor - Discipline - Art - Society & Civilization - Media & News - View All Ishmael Reed Quotations

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