Quotes from Darryl Pinckney

I carried props into the subway - the latest 'Semlotext(e),' a hefty volume of the Frankfurt School - so that the employed would not get the wrong idea or, more to the point, the usual idea about me.

Some books you never get over, like a first love. Some books that made an enormous impression on you when you were young you are afraid to read again years later, like being sorry you met that former love for coffee, because you couldn't see what you once saw. But there are those few books that can still move you in the old, throbbing way." "How I got over

IN the book of my heart, pages keep falling out, many of them marked "Mom and Dad.

She may be a monster, Jeddie, but remember she's our monster," Mom explained to me early on.

If a person cannot imagine a future, then we would say that that person is depressed. But fi a country cannot envision a future, how do we describe its condition?

One thing about pessimism is that it feels sane. Pessimists are those who can't be taken in, people who can't be fooled. I told you so. But it is also a habit of mind. It reconciles us to being powerless. It justifies detachment, indifference. It is even fear of having power....

Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley's recent 'Pictures from the Water Trade.'

Frederick Douglass had charged the air with rebellion and redemption, and these in turn had supported him in the heat of abolitionism. But the atmosphere changed to one of repression after the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

'Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto' is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.

Identity is made up of lots of different things now. Different colors and patterns stand out at different times. Different instruments in the symphony of being are more distinct than others at different times.

'High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.'

I'd waste a holiday trying to set a story in this new place I'd visit, whereas I would never write a story about Indianapolis.

A few of Ellison's short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority 'Invisible Man' gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.

I grew up in Indianapolis, Ind., then a conservative, provincial city. Anglophilia was the first foreign language I was exposed to. Or maybe it was a way of one-upping the local white people. Or maybe it was an early manifestation of homohood.

Black America has always felt itself divided into two classes: the mucky-mucks and the folk.

'Go Tell It on the Mountain,' its pages heavy with sinners brought low and prayers groaning on the wind, scared me when I read it as a teenager.

When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused.

I think at the beginning of one's writing life, negative reviews are what one does to get attention and stake out your territory. It's also often a mistake.

Once upon a time, I was morbidly sensitive about the impertinence born of sociology. Taxi drivers would not stop for me after dark; white girls jogged to keep ahead of my shadow thrown at their heels by the amber street lamps. Part of me didn't blame them, but most of me was hurt.

After Reconstruction, black newspapers evolved from being a propaganda arm into a kind of opposition press, because even the friends of former slaves had their fears.

History is a sly boots, and for a generation of blacks that cannot identify with the frustrations of Jim Crow, and for whites who cannot understand the hard deal that faces working-class blacks, it is difficult to reconcile Hughes's reputation as a poet-hero with his topical verse and uncomplicated prose.

In the years after World War I, blacks began to migrate to the North and its imagined freedoms in great numbers - 'Russian' came to mean a black who had rushed from the South.

Tone is everything.

If the sensitive washout has no taste for extreme gestures, total self-destruction, then his hope for singularity rests in his voice. Tone is everything.