129 Quotes by Ishmael Reed

Free enterprise is not a bad idea and has produced art.

I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year.

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.

I saw Houston Baker, Jr., recently in Los Angeles. I don't bear any ill feelings toward him. In fact, he was very cordial toward me.

Those books are still in print, all the books I've written are still in print, but I heard that other people had been victimized also.

I challenged that and said that he hadn't read much. I mean, how can you make that superlative statement? And he admitted he hadn't read much.

Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don't think the two mix.

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.

I'm not against White writers writing about Blacks as long as they are as objective as say James McPherson writing about an Irish American janitor in his brilliant short story "Gold Coast."