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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
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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
Movement
Wasn
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Sixties
Skeptical
Movements
Sixty
More quotes by 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
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
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
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
I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like amber or opaque.
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
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
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
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
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
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
I try to do what has never been done before.
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
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
Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don't think the two mix.
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 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
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
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
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
