Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Tone is everything.
I never read lying down.
You can get away with anything as long as it works.
'High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.'
The hardest thing about Berlin is letting it belong to other people.
Home is the place where there is somebody who does not wish you any pain.
It's not nothing when you're abroad and you don't have a washing machine.
Criticism shouldn't be a performance that upstages the work it's talking about.
Whatever was said about Ralph Ellison, 'Invisible Man' was considered untouchable.
Harlem's streets lead backward, into history, straight to a work such as 'This Was Harlem.'
Black America has always felt itself divided into two classes: the mucky-mucks and the folk.
If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away.
Eventually, I gave up my sublet in Berlin and stayed in England for a long time - for about 20 years.
If you're bored, your readers will be bored. If you're faking it, you won't get the kind of readers you want.
The novel and the film of 'The Color Purple' are both works of the imagination that make claim to historical truth.
None of the black abolitionist newspapers, the first of which appeared in 1827, was in existence after the Civil War.
Unfortunately for me, I was one of these people who took a long time to learn that the material at his feet was fine.
I can see Obama trying to be the president who suggests solutions for everyone who has experienced economic hardship.
Race pride, socialist ideals, and a sincerity as exalted as that of Carlyle's visionaries coalesced in Asa Philip Randolph.
I can see criticizing, complaining, protesting - anything but choosing not to vote. Too many people died for us not to vote.
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.
When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused.
Europe was a very contentious subject in literature and yet jazz musicians still depended on Europe. Now it's not such a big deal.
The name James Baldwin had been around the house for as long as I could remember and meant almost as much as that of Martin Luther King.
Steven Spielberg's 'The Color Purple' might as well have been about a bunch of dancing eggplants for all it has to say about black history.
The draining away of James Baldwin's magic was a drama much discussed in the years leading up to his death in 1987 at the age of sixty-three.
The history of black people in Manhattan is a story of people getting pushed farther uptown as land acquires new uses and increases in value.
'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.
Manhattan was the capital of the twentieth century for black writers, artists, and intellectuals as much as it was for their white counterparts.
Paule Marshall does not let the black women in her fiction lose. While they lose friends, lovers, husbands, homes, or jobs, they always find themselves.
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.
People from Europe and people from Africa encountered one another long before the invention of "Europe" and "Africa" and "white people" and "black people."
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.
New York's various undergrounds can make for a disciplined apprenticeship, and Gaga takes pride in her earliest fan base of art, fashion and music students.
In the 19th century, Berlin was called the German Chicago. Or Chicago was called the American Berlin because they were sort of new cities or new powerhouses.
'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.
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.
I wrote 'Black Deutschland' very quickly one summer, probably because I had a lot of it in pieces and fragments sitting around over the years as false starts or notes.
The history of blacks is complicated, fragmented, disturbing to contemplate - not a neat trail of challenges met or of felled trees blocking the path to the mountain top.
The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.
When I was in high school, I looked for the black presence in a British historical tradition - before too much slavery and empire - that would not cost me my self-respect.
As long as white newspapers were unwilling or unable to attack 'anti-Negro' forces or to air the views of black reformers, there was a service black newspapers could provide.
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.
Ellison was prominent on the lecture circuit even in the Black Aesthetic days of the Sixties when his defiantly pro-American and prickly-proud intellectual act met with some hostility.
Being a liberal progressive has been demonized as anti-white or overly on the side of blacks. There's nothing that can be done about that; it's just where we are in the history of our perceptions.
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.
Freedom is having real choice. This offers a limited amount of choices. This is participating in a very imperfect system that we're desperately hanging onto, that we don't want to see further eroded.
It's not true that voting doesn't make a difference. To check out is political suicide. This is especially true for our young black artists. You don't want to inadvertently end up doing someone's bidding.
Economic justice is not just something blacks are crying out for; whites are desperate for it, too. But in the public imagination, the face of poverty is black. In all actuality, the face of poverty is white.
Identity has several parts, and the self needs to expand. Black youth should be encouraged to have as many parts or as rich an identity as possible. It's a form of allowing them to be curious about the world.