129 Quotes by Ishmael Reed

My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I wasn't part of any sixties movement. I'm skeptical of movements. I'm part of the times that I'm in.

I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them.

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.

When I say Afro-American aesthetic, I'm not just talking about the United States, I'm talking about the Americas. People in the Latin countries read my books because they share the same international aesthetic that I'm into and have been into for a long time. And it's multicultural.

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.

[David] Mamet is another hypocrite. His idea of Black man is a pimp who abuses women, [Edmond], yet his play Oleanna [1994] ends with a White professor slapping an uppity feminist, at least the version I saw at San Francisco's ACT.

As a writer, you explore all kinds of different emotions.

For generations comedians have made jokes about Scots-Irish in the South inter-breeding. "I am my own grandpa" and all that stuff; you know, because they all were marrying their first cousins.