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A lot of great art comes from the Afro-American male experience. Black men are geniuses, and many times their desperation, their position as being pariahs, leads them to great originality.

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
Times
Desperation
Black
Originality
Comes
Male
Experience
Males
Art
Leads
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Many
Genius
Afros
Great
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Afro
Men
American
Geniuses

More quotes by Ishmael Reed

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One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.
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The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.
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Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.
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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.
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Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don't think the two mix.
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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.
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My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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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.
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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
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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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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
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I try to do what has never been done before.
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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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
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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
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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
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The descendants of Holy Roman Empire monarchies became feeble-minded in the twentieth century, and after World War I had been done in by the democracies some were kept on to entertain the tourists, like the one they have in England.
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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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
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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