Quote

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

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
Guy
Idols
Demagogue
Two
Private
Disagreements
Book
Worship
Fundamentalists
Mean
Writer
Prone
Like
Becomes
Disagreement
Books
Idol
Nice
Published
Audience
Terrific

More quotes by 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
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
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
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Whites have been the most subsidized group in the history of the United States and maybe the history of the world, while Blacks were enslaved and were the assets of Whites.
Ishmael Reed
Image
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
Image
Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.
Ishmael Reed
Image
Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.
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 think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like amber or opaque.
Ishmael Reed
Image
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
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
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
Image
Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.
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