Ishmael Reed

“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.”

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

“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 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'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 had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.”

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

“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.”

“What is the American fetish about highways?They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers.Because something is after them, Black Herman adds.But what is after them?They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress.”