Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Literature
Convince
Pole
America
Sell
Salesman
Anything
Sells
Brooklyn
Every
British
Tobacco
World
South
Traveling
Grow
Bridge
Auctioneer
Style
Prose
Barker
Grows
Bridges
Tomatoes

More quotes by Ishmael Reed

Image
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
Image
Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.
Ishmael Reed
Image
The cultural wars of the sixties are over. I've reconciled with those who were my critics and opponents years ago. I was at odds with some those who were Black nationalists. Yet when feminists attempted to end my career and leave me as literary road kill, it was the Black nationalists who came to my rescue.
Ishmael Reed
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like amber or opaque.
Ishmael Reed
Image
I was roommates with 2 of the guys who were influential in forming the Black Arts philosophy. I called them goons, and [Amiri] Baraka took offense at that. But if you read his autobiography, the night we went up there for a fundraiser, he talks about how he wished that some violence would happen to us. How do you like Baraka as a gracious host
Ishmael Reed
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I try to do what has never been done before.
Ishmael Reed
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I wasn't part of any sixties movement. I'm skeptical of movements. I'm part of the times that I'm in.
Ishmael Reed
Image
I think Black intellectuals see too deeply. That's the problem. It's a cause of anxiety, because we see things differently.
Ishmael Reed
Image
statistic: the us bureau of missing persons reports that in 1968 over 100,000 people disappeared leaving no solid clues nor traceonly a space in the lives of their friends.
Ishmael Reed
Image
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