Ishmael Reed Quotes

“Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.”

— Ishmael Reed

“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.”

— Ishmael Reed

“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.”

— Ishmael Reed

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.

— Ishmael Reed

“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.”

— Ishmael Reed

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

— Ishmael Reed

During the last decades, films about the black experience have been produced, directed, and even scripted by white men. Some of them are excellent. But most reflect George Bernard Shaw's warning that 'if you do not tell your stories others will tell them for you and they will vulgarize and degrade you.'

— Ishmael Reed

“American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.”

— Ishmael Reed

“In Haitian mythology there is the figure Ghede, who in West Africa, is Iku, whose role is to show "each man his devil." He's represented by a figure wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar. That's my gig.”

— Ishmael Reed

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

— Ishmael Reed

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

— Ishmael Reed

I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like "amber" or "opaque."

— Ishmael Reed

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

— Ishmael Reed

“The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With important connections to publishing, and universities, with access to the major book reviews, they were able to pose as the vanguard of American culture when they were so obsessed with the two Joes
McCarthy and Stalin
that they were to produce only two artists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who left town.”

— Ishmael Reed

If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.

— Ishmael Reed

“I've always wondered why European politicians as a group seemed brighter than American politicians as a group. Maybe it's becausemany American politicians have the race issue to fall back on. They become lazy, suspicious of innovative ideas, and as a result American institutions atrophy.”

— Ishmael Reed

“For generations comedians have made jokes about Scots-Irish in the South inter-breeding. "I am my own grandpa" and all that stuff; you know, because they all were marrying their first cousins.”

— Ishmael Reed

“Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual "morning in America" paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial.”

— Ishmael Reed

A black boxer's career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.

— Ishmael Reed

“Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.”

— Ishmael Reed

What was once dormant is now a Creeping Thing

— Ishmael Reed

“I try to do what has never been done before.”

— Ishmael Reed

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

— Ishmael Reed

“Regardless of the criticisms I receive from the left, the right and the middle, I think it's important to maintain a prolific writing jab, as long as my literary legs hold up.”

— Ishmael Reed

“Native Americans were driven off their land. Lincoln even took part in the Black Hawk campaign against the Native Americans in Illinois. While they were being exterminated and driven off their land, Whites were collecting assets.”

— Ishmael Reed

“My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.”

— Ishmael Reed

“I think there are fundamentalists all over the world. I think all religions have fundamentalists who have different interpretations of scriptures that are very vague.”

— Ishmael Reed

David Simon [the creator of The Wire] and I have a running controversy for years. It all stems from a telephone call I made to KPFA [Pacifica radio] when he was a guest there in the 90's on Chris Welche's show. He was going around the country with a Black kid from the Ghetto to promote something called The Corner - it was all about Blacks as degenerates selling drugs, etc.

— Ishmael Reed

“I don't know why people always compare me [ with Amiri Baraka] I was never part of the Black Arts Repertory Theater or the Black Arts Movement; people who claim that I was are wrong. I was downtown. I was living in Chelsea when they were operating in Harlem.”

— Ishmael Reed

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

— Ishmael Reed

“I was on a panel with light skinned Blacks and a famous gay science fiction writer, who were complaining about how Blacks are against gays and light skinned Blacks and how intolerant Blacks are of different groups. My position was that Blacks were among the most humanistic, tolerant groups in the country and that across the street from my house in Oakland was one inhabited by White gays.”

— Ishmael Reed

“I was challenged to a fistfight by Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times writer, who is part of a feminist clique at the Times, which believes that Black men are the principal threat to the women of the world.”

— Ishmael Reed

Do you think that Gwendolyn Brooks would give an award to someone who hated Black women, the lie that was circulated throughout New York and reached all the way down to Martinique where I was a guest Professor? The lie was circulated by people who don't read my books.

— Ishmael Reed

“I asked Joe Weixlmann why he would print a death threat like that in light of the fact that there are all of these armed ideological nuts wandering around loose. He said that for him, to "ice" someone means to reprimand them.”

— Ishmael Reed

“What I can't understand why Blacks can't achieve royal status when it comes to forms that they have largely created? I mean there's a White King of Rock n' Roll, there's a White King of Jazz, how come we can never achieve titles of royalty in these fields we are supposed to prevail in? They held a so called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the other night, where White judges credit people who resemble them with the invention of Rock and Roll. I didn't even see Blacks in the audience.”

— Ishmael Reed

“I reached the age of 70, because I have cultivated an association of multicultural intellectuals who are informed and alert to whatever "tricknology" that's laid on us by the powers that be. These include White ethnic intellectuals- people who know their roots- as well as Native American, Asian American, Hispanic and Black intellectuals. These are thirty, forty-year associations with some of the best minds around. Minds that are ignored by the media.”

— Ishmael Reed

“When I say Afro-American aesthetic, I'm not just talking about the United States, I'm talking about the Americas. People in the Latin countries read my books because they share the same international aesthetic that I'm into and have been into for a long time. And it's multicultural.”

— Ishmael Reed

“As for [Amiri] Baraka, he and I have disagreements. I mean, he becomes a demagogue when there's an audience. He's a nice guy in private. I mean I like the guy; he's a terrific writer. I've published two of his books. Baraka is one of these fundamentalists who is prone to idol worship.”

— Ishmael Reed

Given all of the anti-Muslim propaganda that's being disseminated by The American Nazi media, you have to be careful. It can stress you out.

— Ishmael Reed

“Richard Price, who has made a fortune writing fake ghetto books, says he takes a cab into the ghetto, transcribes Black speech for a brief time and returns home. His fake ghetto books have bought him a townhouse in Gramercy Park and home on Staten Island.”

— Ishmael Reed

“Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history.”

— Ishmael Reed

Phillip Roth uses his Black women characters to make anti intellectual remarks about Black history month, begun by a man who reached intellectual heights that Roth will never attain.Roth is a petty bigot and his ignorant remarks about black culture expose him as a buffoon to scholars the world over.

— Ishmael Reed

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.

— Ishmael Reed

“Two of the great leaders of the past - Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass - had White fathers - who deserted them. Now Margo Jefferson, who is hard on me and the fellas, wrote in the Times that she has nocturnal, erotic fantasies about John Wayne. What's up with these feminists? Do you see these double standards these feminists have? They dream about John Wayne, but they're hard on us [Black men].”

— Ishmael Reed

“There would be no Rock and Roll without Ike Turner, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, etc. Fake ghetto books and fake ghetto music. Elvis Presley, whom they idol, is merely a karaoke makeover of James Brown and Chuck Berry.”

— Ishmael Reed

“Another California study counted 30,000 substance abusers who are pregnant are White woman. So, The Wire paints the picture of drug addiction, drug dealing, and drug abuse as being a specifically a Black issue.”

— Ishmael Reed

“Constance L. Rice, co-director of the Los Angeles of the Advancement Project, told the Times that Seltzer might have been influenced by David Simon's fake ghetto series, "The Wire." It figures. Isn't this sexism? Isn't this a double standard? They're hard on this young woman for her fake ghetto book, yet praise these White guys for theirs. So there's a big market in downing Black men.”

— Ishmael Reed

I think Black intellectuals see too deeply. That's the problem. It's a cause of anxiety, because we see things differently.

— Ishmael Reed

“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.”

— Ishmael Reed

“[David] Mamet is another hypocrite. His idea of Black man is a pimp who abuses women, [Edmond], yet his play Oleanna [1994] ends with a White professor slapping an uppity feminist, at least the version I saw at San Francisco's ACT.”

— Ishmael Reed