8 Quotes by John A. Williams

,It must be pretty awful for a white man to learn that one of the things wrong with this society is that it is not based on dollars directly or alone, but dollars denied men who are black so dollars can go into the pockets of men who are white. It must make white men ponder a kind of weakness that will make them deny work to black men so that work can be done by men who are white.

…I was becoming acutely aware […] that Negroes rarely were allowed to be experts about themselves; others always knew more, wrote or said more, or at least what they said or wrote got around more and certainly was given more credence.

Novelists would do well to remember that when the works of the scholar-historians create doubt in the researcher’s mind, the researcher then turns to literature as a primary source for confirmation or correction. If the truth of a time, a people, a state is not available anywhere else, let it be in the novel. - from Twayne’s US Authors Series: JOHN A WILLIAMS by Gilbert Muller

The worst kind of tyrant was the one who once had been the victim.

,Bloodlust is like a natural disaster; it has to run its course. I have seen their faces; they are faces out of nightmares—most ordinary—so ordinary that you can’t believe the brains behind them capable of genocide.

Man is nature, nature man, and all crude and raw, stinking, vicious, evil. And holding that evil lightly because the collective mind refuses to recall the spring of mountains, the vault of seas and, of course, beside that, the puny murder of millions.

Novelists would do well to remember that when the works of the scholar-historians create doubt in the researcher’s mind, the researcher then turns to literature as a primary source for confirmation or correction. If the truth of a time, a people, a state is not available anywhere else, let it be in the novel. – from Twayne’s US Authors Series: JOHN A WILLIAMS by Gilbert Muller.

One looks at death, always moves toward it, but until the last denies its existence.