106 Quotes by Amiri Baraka

My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with... namely America... Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthyism and all those great things.

As a political artist, I think you have to learn how to create art, no matter what your ideology is.

I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.

You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.

The man who buried Malcolm X - my Muslim imam, priest - he, after I got beat up by police... came to me, and he said, 'You don't need this American name.' And I was susceptible to it at the time because, God knows, I had just gotten whipped near to death. So he gave me an Arab name; he gave me the name Amir Barakat.

'Griot' is a French word which means, you know, really, literally, 'cry.' You know, like the town crier. You know, they come in and say, you know, 'It's nine o'clock; everything is cool.' You know, 'President Bush is a fool.' I mean, stuff like that just to tell you. But for the kind of, the African thing is called djali.

I met Malcolm the month before he was killed. He deeply changed my mind about America.

I had just been in some repressive situations - the black middle-class college scene and the crazy United States Air Force - and so I just felt like getting out of that. I thought, now, that I wanted to be a writer. I had something that I wanted to do, that I was interested in doing, so I wanted to pursue that.

It seems natural to me that as a writer, you should have some kind of, you know, there should be some kind of projection that you actually have influenced people who are closest to you.