73 Quotes by Darryl Pinckney

Criticism shouldn’t be a performance that upstages the work it’s talking about.

It’s not nothing when you’re abroad and you don’t have a washing machine.

Europe was a very contentious subject in literature and yet jazz musicians still depended on Europe. Now it’s not such a big deal.

The point of Berlin was that it seemed that only people like you ran the city. You never ran into people who weren’t like you – especially when you lived as that kind of American in Berlin connected to the arts.

Identity is made up of lots of different things now. Different colors and patterns stand out at different times. Different instruments in the symphony of being are more distinct than others at different times.

Once upon a time, I was morbidly sensitive about the impertinence born of sociology. Taxi drivers would not stop for me after dark; white girls jogged to keep ahead of my shadow thrown at their heels by the amber street lamps. Part of me didn't blame them, but most of me was hurt.

For a long time, Nella Larsen was the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance. In the late 1920s, she published two sophisticated novels, 'Quicksand' and 'Passing,' and then her writing life came to an end. She died in obscurity in 1964.

The demise of Reconstruction had made it hard for blacks to acquire capital or to pass on property to their children. As blacks were driven from all but the most limited spheres of business and political life, the prestige of the professional rose in the black community.

If the sensitive washout has no taste for extreme gestures, total self-destruction, then his hope for singularity rests in his voice. Tone is everything.