Ishmael Reed famous quotes

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.'
-- Ishmael Reed

#Men #White #Black

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.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Country #Makeup #Taste

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Writing #Imagination #Poetry

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.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Men #Six #News

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.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Writing #Thinking #Long

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.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Music #Eye #Light

I'm beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of deathamong Americans. What you don't know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright's character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Education #Hurt #Cancer

The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With important connections to publishing, and universities, with access to the major book reviews, they were able to pose as the vanguard of American culture when they were so obsessed with the two Joes--McCarthy and Stalin--that they were to produce only two artists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who left town.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Art #New York #Book

If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Bridges #America #Style

I've always wondered why European politicians as a group seemed brighter than American politicians as a group. Maybe it's becausemany American politicians have the race issue to fall back on. They become lazy, suspicious of innovative ideas, and as a result American institutions atrophy.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Fall #Race #Ideas

Few white citizens are acquainted with blacks other than those projected by the media and the so--called educational system, whichis nothing more than a system of rewards and punishments based upon one's ability to pledge loyalty oaths to Anglo culture. The media and the "educational system" are the prime sources of racism in the United States.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Education #Loyalty #White

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.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Education #Sex #Race

The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Education #Race #African 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.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Morning #Views #Media

statistic: the us bureau of missing persons reports that in 1968 over 100,000 people disappeared leaving no solid clues nor traceonly a space in the lives of their friends.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Space #People #Missing

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.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Careers #Perfect #Black

The descendants of Holy Roman Empire monarchies became feeble-minded in the twentieth century, and after World War I had been done in by the democracies; some were kept on to entertain the tourists, like the one they have in England.
-- Ishmael Reed

#War #Democracy #Tourists

The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are referred to in the newspapers as blacks and African Americans must include Europe and Native America.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Past #Europe #America

The liberal wing of the feminist movement may have improved the lives of its middle- and upper-class constituency--indeed, 1992 was the Year of the White Middle Class Woman--but since the leadership of this faction of the feminist movement has singled out black men as the meta-enemy of women, these women represent one of the most serious threats to black male well-being since the Klan.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Men #Years #Class

My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Poetry #Musician #Able

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.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Jobs #Hippie #California

Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Writing #Justice #Definitions

Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Party #Tea #Members

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.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Dog #New Orleans #Popcorn

What was once dormant is now a Creeping Thing
-- Ishmael Reed

#Dormant

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

#Art #Ideas #Enterprise

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

#Baseball #Chicago #United States

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.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Men #Years #Black

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Reading #Joy #Plugs

I try to do what has never been done before.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Trying #Done

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

#Writing #Men #Fleeting

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

#Sex #Culture #Way

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.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Country #Weekend #Thinking

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.
-- Ishmael Reed

#Discipline #Honor #Racist