Quotes from Ishmael Reed

I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them.

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.

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.

My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it's like a session of the American Diabetic Association.

My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

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.

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

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.

Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.

I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.

All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree.

Dualism::In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man I am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage. i am outside of history. its hungrier than i thot.

Fear stalks the land. (As usual; so what else is new?)

Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own ego and cannot live well with other people and the world. They have lost the tune of life. They only live in cold thinking. Their feelings are deeply repressed while they attach themselves forlornly to the earth.

democracy and freedom began bouncing all over the world like bad checks

He said he felt like the gut heart and lungs of Africa's interior. He said he felt like the Kongo: "Land of the Panther." He said he felt like "deserting his master," as the Kongo is "prone to do." He said he felt he could dance on a dime.

But what have Cortes and Pizarro or the others to do with me? You carry them in your blood as I carry the blood of Montezume; expeditions of them are harbored by your heart and your mind carries their supply trains. You've changed your helmet for a frontier hat while I have changed my robes for overalls and a black leather jacket. The costumes may have changed but the blood is still the same, gringo.

Orthodoxy is my Doxy, Heterodoxy is the other fellow's Doxy.

What is the American fetish about highways? They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers. Because something is after them, Black Herman adds. But what is after them? They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress.

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.

Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around.

Yes. You see, it's not 1 of those germs that break bleed suck gnaw or devour. It's nothing we can bring into focus or categorize; once we call it 1 thing it forms into something else.