Quotes from Mat Johnson

It is a great moment in every freak's life when he or she finds out that at least they are not the only one.

I love the idea of biracial. I actually don't use the word biracial. I tend to use mixed. Biracial to me accentuates the word race, and, you know, I don't really care for it.

Every misogynist came out of a woman.

A man's daughter is his heart. Just with feet, walking out in the world.

It is a great moment in every freak's life when he or she finds out that at least they are not the only one.

I have found that, in the African American oral tradition, if the words are enunciated eloquently enough, no one examines the meaning for definitive truth.

People aren't social, they're tribal. Race doesn't exist, but tribes are fucking real.

The sociopaths, that's the real problem. The whole street demeanor is about pretending to be a sociopath as well, so that the real ones can't find you.

Since White America refuses to see its past, they can't really see me either. Add to that a little of Madame C.J.s magic and watch me go invisible. Watch me step outside of history. Assimilation as revolution. That's one thing that most of us know that white folks don't. Race doesn't really exist. Culture? Ethnicity? Sure. Class too. But race is just a bunch of rules meant to keep us on the bottom. Race is a strategy. The rest is just people acting playing roles.

Forgiveness comes later in life, after you've created enough disasters of your own.

What I discovered during my studies in Poe's and other early Americans' texts was the intellectual source of racial Whiteness. Here, in these pages, was the very fossil record of how this odd and illogical sickness formed. Here was the twisted mythic underpinnings of modern racial thought that could never before be dismantled because we were standing on them.

There are two types of lazy bosses. One is so lazy that they make you do not only your own work but theirs too. Worse, they lie to you about it, unloading all responsibility for their actions. The other is so lazy that not only do they not do their own work but they can't even be bothered to provide you work to do. These bosses lie as well, but only to themselves, passively. The first is the hardest boss to work for, the second the easiest.

In this age when reality is built on big lies, what better place for truth than fiction?

I was participating in something horrible, and my only defense is that I was motivated by my own fear, which of course is no defense at all.

I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages. I like finding evidence of myself there, after being told my footprints did not exist on that sand. I think the work of the great white writers is important, but I think it's most important when it's negotiating me and my people, because I am as arrogant and selfish a reader as any other.

People look at interracial couples through their own, distorting racial lens. It doesn't matter what form they take.

I was a boy that age once, and I know that 97.7 percent of their bodies are semen and the 2.8 percent is an incendiary device for spraying it.

Even drunk, I knew any escape plan that involved going to Detroit, Michigan, was a harbinger of doom.

Curing America's racial pathology couldn't be done with good intentions or presidential elections.

Every misogynist came out of a woman.

Some people age, and some just dehydrate.

The people, they need someone to live through. Trust me, I used to be in roller derby back in the day. People need a hero.

Here I was, on the cusp of my own great dream, my own impossible truth, and this gluttonous man was crowding it with his improbable vision. There wasn't enough magic in the universe for both of us. Worse, Garth's mad theory put mine in an altogether new light. Was I as crazy as his fat ass?

That is how they stay so white: by refusing to accept blemish or history. Whiteness isn't about being something, it is about being no thing, nothing, an erasure. Covering over the truth with layers of blank reality just as the snowstorm was now covering our tent...(225)