Quotes from Ishmael Reed

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

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.

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.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

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

Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don't think the two mix.

Whites have been the most subsidized group in the history of the United States and maybe the history of the world, while Blacks were enslaved and were the assets of Whites.

I guess when it comes to this privileged White racist feminist movement they respect someone who treats them rough: John Wayne. Frank Sinatra. Phillip Roth.

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.

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

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 have T.V. on all the time when I'm writing. I have music on. I'm engaged with the world.

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.

Thomas C. Foster

Whenever sophistry and rhetoric fail they send in their poor White goons. They don't have the guts of real gangsters. The letters after their names are their tommy guns and those universities where they pour over syllables in the many cubicles, their Big House.

A hot mean and bitchy desert with a naturally formed misanthropic mood seemed to be saying well Loop good buddy, how you want it dished up, scorpion bite, rattlesnake, order anything you see.

This morning. We got reports from down here that people were doing "stupid sensual things," were in a state of "uncontrollable frenzy," were wriggling like fish, doing something called the "Eagle Rock" and the "Sassy Bump"; were cutting a mean "Mooche," and "lusting after relevance.

The spirit hits them and they follow (My italics) Louis Armstrong Mumbo Jumbo [Mandingo m?-m?-gyo-mb?, "magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away": m?-m?, grandmother+gyo, trouble+ mb?, to leave.] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

THE WALLFLOWER ORDER ATTEMPTS to meet the psychic plague by installing an anti-Jes Grew President, Warren Harding. He wins on the platform "Let's be done with Wiggle and Wobble,"* indicating that he will not tolerate this spreading infection. All sympathizers will be dealt with; all carriers isolated and disinfected, Immumo-Therapy will begin once he takes office.

So don't ask me how to catch Jes Grew. Ask Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, your poets, your painters, your musicians, ask them how to catch it. Ask those people who be shaking their tambourines impervious of the ridicule they receive from Black and White Atonists, Europe the ghost rattling its chains down the deserted halls of their brains.

back off from this poem it is a greedy mirror you are into this poem from the waist down nobody can hear you can they ? this poem has had you up to here.

To some if you owned your own mind you were indeed sickout when you possessed and Antagonist mind you were healthy. A mind which sought to interpret the world by using a single loa. Somewhat like filling a milk bottle with an ocean.

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.

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