Ishmael Reed Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

Ishmael Reed
I don't know where they get the bourgeois idea that art shouldn't be political.

Ishmael Reed
New York was possessed of that old European idea of respecting or even revering the writer or the artist. I mean, if you were black in those days, you could get by with one poem or one novel. If I had remained in New York, I would've been killed by an overdose of affection.

Ishmael Reed
When I look at American civilization in terms of two thousand years, I think the European invasion and the white nationalism that followed might have been just an unhappy period, an unfortunate phase in civilizations that are thousands of years old.

Ishmael Reed
With literature you can condemn the powerful, and you can critique the power­ful.

Ishmael Reed
Neo-HooDoo believes that every man is an artist and every artist a priest.

Ishmael Reed
The rappers brought back rhyme. Critics try to put these kids down, but many of them are good writers. I shouldn't be surprised by the sophistication, some of the allusions—some of them have read widely and just draw on a whole lot of different material. They really have restored an interest in poetry. It's democratic and it's worldwide.

Ishmael Reed
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
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
Do not resist this poem
this poem has yr eyes
this poem has his head
this poem has his arms
this poem has his fingers
this poem has his fingertips.

Ishmael Reed
Are there black racists? Of course there are, and the media, which serve as the chief arm of white nationalist propaganda, joyfully reward the blacks who make anti-white and anti-Semitic statements with considerable coverage, as a way of attracting viewers to their vile products and providing whites with entertainment, while embarrassing blacks.

Ishmael Reed
All: Our God is a walking God
He is not one still in stone
Our God is a walking God
He moves through the towns and cities
Through mountains and valleys
He roams.

Ishmael Reed
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
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
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
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra,
sidewinders in the saloons of fools
bit my forehead like O
the untrustworthiness of Egyptologists
who do not know their trips. Who was that
dog-faced man? they asked, the day I rode
from town.

Ishmael Reed
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
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
The universe is a spiraling Big Band in a polka-dotted speakeasy, effusively generating new light every one-night stand.
Sometimes misquoted as effectively instead of effusively

Ishmael Reed
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
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
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
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