Ishmael Reed
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.Collection: Imagination
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 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.
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.
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.
Free enterprise is not a bad idea and has produced art.
Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.
During the last decades, films about the black experience have been produced, directed, and even scripted by white men. Some of them are excellent. But most reflect George Bernard Shaw’s warning that 'if you do not tell your stories others will tell them for you and they will vulgarize and degrade you.'Collection: Men
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.Collection: Writing
One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.Collection: Book
I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them.Collection: Medical Problems
A black boxer's career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.Collection: Careers
History is the story of warfare between secret societies.Collection: Secret
American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.Collection: Education
Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.Collection: Writing
In Haitian mythology there is the figure Ghede, who in West Africa, is Iku, whose role is to show "each man his devil." He's represented by a figure wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar. That's my gig.Collection: Men
The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.Collection: Education
What was once dormant is now a Creeping ThingCollection: Dormant
Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.Collection: Writing
In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.Collection: Country
A lot of great art comes from the Afro-American male experience. Black men are geniuses, and many times their desperation, their position as being pariahs, leads them to great originality.Collection: Art
We learn about one another's culture the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.Collection: Love
We not only grew up on Be-Bop; Be-Bop raised us. For my generation, Be-Bop came on like a light bulb going flash behind the eyes.For us, it was not only an intellectual movement, but a way of life. We walked, dressed, and rapped Be-Bop.Collection: Music
How does the [New York] Times treat White pathology? They reported an epidemic of heroin addiction in the Philadelphia suburbs. which included emergency admissions and overdoses; these White people in the suburbs were doing heroin like it was going out of style. I counted the words: the article consisted of 200 words. "Heroin Epidemic" in the back section. Out here in California, the typical drug addict is a housewife or suburban White woman.Collection: New York
I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like "amber" or "opaque."Collection: Thinking
I reached the age of 70, because I have cultivated an association of multicultural intellectuals who are informed and alert to whatever "tricknology" that's laid on us by the powers that be. These include White ethnic intellectuals- people who know their roots- as well as Native American, Asian American, Hispanic and Black intellectuals. These are thirty, forty-year associations with some of the best minds around. Minds that are ignored by the media.Collection: Native American
Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual "morning in America" paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial.Collection: Morning
Neo-Hoodoo is the 8 basic dances of 19th century New Orleans' Place Congo- the Calinda the Bamboula the Chacta the Babouille the Conjaille the Juba the Congo and the VooDoo- modernized into the Philly Dog, the Hully Gully, the Funky Chicken, the Popcorn, the Boogaloo and the dance of great American choreographer Buddy Bradley.Collection: Dog
Hateful material travels the globe. A few years ago, CNN, America's Der Sturmer, ran a story about Black parents being so low down that they abandoned their children and the children had to eat rats. I was at a University in Wisconsin at the time and the mother of a student from South Africa called to see whether the story was true. She had seen it all the way over there. The story was untrue. The children lied. CNN never corrected the story.Collection: Mother
I use non-fiction work written by Whites in my research. It's indispensable. That wasn't the problem. I said that "The Wire" was a cliché! It's like my writing a series about Jewish life and casting all of the characters as inside traders.Collection: Writing
The plays raise issues that are ignored in other forums.Collection: Play
In Crash, you've got a pathological cop who at the end justifies police brutality. He tells the naïve, young cop that you're going to end up the same as him. He's the most sympathetic character in the movie. So, the naïve cop ends up murdering this Black kid and tries to cover up the evidence. It sort of justifies police brutality and the planting of evidence which is what happened in the O.J. Simpson case.Collection: Character
I don't know why people always compare me [ with Amiri Baraka] I was never part of the Black Arts Repertory Theater or the Black Arts Movement; people who claim that I was are wrong. I was downtown. I was living in Chelsea when they were operating in Harlem.Collection: Art
As a writer, you explore all kinds of different emotions.Collection: Different
Phillip Roth uses his Black women characters to make anti intellectual remarks about Black history month, begun by a man who reached intellectual heights that Roth will never attain. Roth is a petty bigot and his ignorant remarks about black culture expose him as a buffoon to scholars the world over.Collection: Character
I was roommates with 2 of the guys who were influential in forming the Black Arts philosophy. I called them "goons," and [Amiri] Baraka took offense at that. But if you read his autobiography, the night we went up there for a fundraiser, he talks about how he wished that some violence would happen to us. How do you like Baraka as a gracious host?Collection: Art
Howard University holds something called "Heart's Day," an all day ceremony in which a writer is honored. I was the recipient of this honor. It's a wonderful ceremony that Eleanor Traylor chair of English at Howard University organizes for writers. Writers from around the country came to pay tribute to my work. It was very flattering.Collection: Country
The cultural wars of the sixties are over. I've reconciled with those who were my critics and opponents years ago. I was at odds with some those who were Black nationalists. Yet when feminists attempted to end my career and leave me as literary road kill, it was the Black nationalists who came to my rescue.Collection: War
Do you think that Gwendolyn Brooks would give an award to someone who hated Black women, the lie that was circulated throughout New York and reached all the way down to Martinique where I was a guest Professor? The lie was circulated by people who don't read my books.Collection: New York
I was on a panel with light skinned Blacks and a famous gay science fiction writer, who were complaining about how Blacks are against gays and light skinned Blacks and how intolerant Blacks are of different groups. My position was that Blacks were among the most humanistic, tolerant groups in the country and that across the street from my house in Oakland was one inhabited by White gays.Collection: Country
I was challenged to a fistfight by Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times writer, who is part of a feminist clique at the Times, which believes that Black men are the principal threat to the women of the world.Collection: New York
Joel Chandler Harris, who created a multi billion dollar industry, everything from his books, to Disney's "Song of the South" based upon the Uncle Remus stories. He got his start by transcribing the stories of slave Informants. I'm sure that none them got a dime.Collection: Song
Richard Price, who has made a fortune writing fake ghetto books, says he takes a cab into the ghetto, transcribes Black speech for a brief time and returns home. His fake ghetto books have bought him a townhouse in Gramercy Park and home on Staten Island.Collection: Book
I asked Joe Weixlmann why he would print a death threat like that in light of the fact that there are all of these armed ideological nuts wandering around loose. He said that for him, to "ice" someone means to reprimand them.Collection: Mean
I get most my information about what's happening in the United States from reports and studies, which are often in conflict with what you read on the editorial pages, or handouts from right wing institutions like the American Enterprise Institute.Collection: Wings
Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don't think the two mix.Collection: Thinking
Americans are fickle. And what constitutes the enemy is always changing. Believe it or not, at one time Blacks were the favored model minority over Asian Americans.Collection: Believe
I'm sure that a previous generation of Jews who published radical newspapers and journals would be critical of [David] Simon's projects. These were left wingers who suffered casualties in some of bloodiest strikes in American history.Collection: Would Be
My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it's like a session of the American Diabetic Association.Collection: Black
David Simon goes to the Jewish Weekly and said he's made all this money, but he can't enjoy it because of criticism by people like Ishmael Reed.Collection: People