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Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

Ishmael Reed

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Ishmael Reed
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: February 22
Author
Journalist
Lyricist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Songwriter
Writer
Chattanooga
Tennessee
Ishmael Scott Reed
Manual
Manuals
Labor
Poetry
Imagination
Hard
Writing

More quotes by Ishmael Reed

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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
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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.
Ishmael Reed
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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
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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.
Ishmael Reed
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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
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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
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Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.
Ishmael Reed
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I have Black guys who tell me they put my books on their bed stands to read at night like something for guidance or information. That really pleases me a lot. I think my work has changed some things. It's changed me.
Ishmael Reed
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I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like amber or opaque.
Ishmael Reed
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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
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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
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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
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I'm sure that a previous generation of Jews who published radical newspapers and journals would be critical of [David] Simon's projects. These were left wingers who suffered casualties in some of bloodiest strikes in American history.
Ishmael Reed
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I use non-fiction work written by Whites in my research. It's indispensable. That wasn't the problem. I said that The Wire was a cliché! It's like my writing a series about Jewish life and casting all of the characters as inside traders.
Ishmael Reed
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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
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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.
Ishmael Reed
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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
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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
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One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.
Ishmael Reed
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History is the story of warfare between secret societies.
Ishmael Reed