Quote

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

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
Style
Stuff
Muhammad
Back
Essays
Firsts
Appeared
Book
Compared
First
Boxing
Writing
Critics
Way
Direct

More quotes by Ishmael Reed

Image
What was once dormant is now a Creeping Thing
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 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've always wondered why European politicians as a group seemed brighter than American politicians as a group. Maybe it's becausemany American politicians have the race issue to fall back on. They become lazy, suspicious of innovative ideas, and as a result American institutions atrophy.
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
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
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
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
Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.
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
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
Image
One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.
Ishmael Reed
Image
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
Image
Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don't think the two mix.
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
Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.
Ishmael Reed
Image
The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.
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
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
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