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Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.
Ishmael Reed
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Ishmael Reed
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: February 22
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Science Fiction Writer
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Chattanooga
Tennessee
Ishmael Scott Reed
American
Multicultural
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More quotes by 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
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
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
I'm beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of deathamong Americans. What you don't know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright's character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.
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
One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.
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
Americans are fickle. And what constitutes the enemy is always changing. Believe it or not, at one time Blacks were the favored model minority over Asian Americans.
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
What was once dormant is now a Creeping Thing
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
I think Black intellectuals see too deeply. That's the problem. It's a cause of anxiety, because we see things differently.
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
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
Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don't think the two mix.
Ishmael Reed
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
History is the story of warfare between secret societies.
Ishmael Reed
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
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
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
