Quotes from Chester Himes

Man cannot live without some knowledge of the purpose of life. If he can find no purpose in life he creates one in the inevitability of death.

American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.

Democracy is not tolerance. Democracy is a prescribed way of life erected on the premise that all men are created equal.

I would sit in my room and become hysterical about the wild incredible story I was writing. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.

The Harlem of my books was never meant to be real; I never called it real; I just wanted to take it away from the white man if only in my books.

My feelings are too intense. I hate too bitterly, I love too exaltingly, I pity too extravagantly, I hurt too painfully. We American blacks call that "soul."

I grew to manhood in the Ohio State Penitentiary.