Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm still vulnerable and still weak.
Things seem to fall apart inevitably.
Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.
I believe - what did Faulkner say? "The past is not even past."
Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.
Stories are told over time, and so they naturally accrue meanings.
I want to give the evidence in a way that is convincing, but I don't want to cheat.
I get off on anticipating and waiting much more than I get off on the actual event.
Basketball can give us a kind of mystical awareness. Everything seems focused and in balance.
Hell, I'm going to play pro basketball. I'm going to maybe be famous. I'm going to write books.
I really dislike it when people talk about "experimental," because any good writer is experimental.
I don't have anybody living around me who has much of a sense of what I do. That's exactly what I like.
If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up?
As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.
My father was intelligent and closed-mouthed. He knew a lot more than what he was ever going to tell you.
Real change is always violent, but it may hurt a lot less than what's in place before the violence occurs.
Even in my adult years, when I heard a white person speaking in a Southern accent I was initially suspicious.
There are still horrible things that go on because of the myth of race, but we don't have to succumb totally.
I had a deep prejudice against the South. It's taken me many years to get over that, be more open and thoughtful.
You have to be a minor superhero just to get to be a dignified man, and that's kind of exacerbated for men of color.
Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.
I don't tell everything. I want the reader to have the feeling that maybe they know the whole truth, but they don't.
I don't make that hard and fast distinction between political and nonpolitical writing. I write about what bothers me.
I can't pretend that I did one really awful thing - I took a bite out of the apple but now I'm never going to sin again.
When I'm doing the brute work, I do it early in the morning; that's the best time for me to get the stuff down on the page.
I have written about the women around me. My ancestors, my relatives, lovers. It was a way of trying to make it all make sense.
Seamless, careful, by-the-book performance provides no evidence of what the spider's thinking about the fly enmeshed in its web.
What I wanted to do in talking about basketball in 'Hoop Roots' was retrieve the game as something to participate in, not to watch.
We're dreamers and - since we only have one life, and if we screw up we can get in a world of trouble - we're very intense dreamers.
To be a survivor as an African American man - maybe any man - you have to be pretty tough. Or at least that's what we all understand.
That's what writing is: it's imagining that you can make a world. That's what basketball is, too: it's imagining the game as a world.
That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is.
One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back.
If I had only a negative side of things to present, I think I would have much less of a drive to do it. Because what would be the point?
The whole idea of spellbinding, of being an entertainer, being the center of the stage, making up words - that let me know that writing is nice.
For African-American people, I am in the business of inventing a reality that gives a different perspective - on history, on crime, on art, on love.
I assume the risk of allowing my fiction to enter other people's true stories. And to be fair, I let other people's stories trespass the truth of mine.
Too much is made for us; too much is given to us - even those of us who are underprivileged. The poverty is given to us. The difficulties are given to us.
I think I was kind of melancholy as a kid. I spent a lot of time inside my own head, a lot of time sort of staring into space wondering the hell was going on.
A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips, teaches us to perceive reality differently.
I call people by their initials when they're good buddies, and that's a kinda street thing, too - 'Here comes JF,' or, 'Here comes KC.' It's fun; it's intimate.
Silence marks time, saturates and shapes African-American art. Silences structure our music, fill the spaces - point, counterpoint - of rhythm, cadence, phrasing.
A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips and teaches us to perceive reality differently.
My mother loved my father. From my view, she let him get away with too much. It broke my heart to see him in an old people's home and stop being strong and lose his voice.
I try to cope by doing what I do, what I find purpose and joy in. For me, that has been writing and playing ball. It doesn't make the pain go away, but what else can I do?
Remember that a book is many drafts - mine certainly are. It's improvisation. It's as much jazz and the way we talk and the way I heard people preach coming up as it is writing.
My father was a veteran. He fought in World War II. He was a patriot. On the other hand, he had no illusions whatsoever about how Uncle Sam had mistreated him and other black soldiers.
When I wake up in the morning, I need the writing to go to. I begin there. And that's not an accident, I mean, that habit of getting up in the morning and going to my writing first thing.
My father combined many of the elements that were feared in the culture, but also he was a warm figure, a figure we needed. We depended on him to give us a little bit of strength and courage.
I lived with my mother and father and brothers and sisters some of the time; some of the time, my mother and father were feuding, so my mother would take us to live in my grandmother's house.