Top 60 Ishmael Reed Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.”

— Ishmael Reed

2. “I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don’t use words like “amber” or “opaque.””

— Ishmael Reed

3. “Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.”

— Ishmael Reed

4. “What was once dormant is now a Creeping Thing.”

— Ishmael Reed

5. “Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.”

— Ishmael Reed

6. “Joel Chandler Harris, who created a multi billion dollar industry, everything from his books, to Disney’s “Song of the South” based upon the Uncle Remus stories. He got his start by transcribing the stories of slave Informants. I’m sure that none them got a dime.”

— Ishmael Reed

7. “In Haitian mythology there is the figure Ghede, who in West Africa, is Iku, whose role is to show “each man his devil.” He’s represented by a figure wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar. That’s my gig.”

— Ishmael Reed

8. “I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.”

— Ishmael Reed

9. “The plays raise issues that are ignored in other forums.”

— Ishmael Reed

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

— Ishmael Reed

11. “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.”

— Ishmael Reed

12. “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.”

— Ishmael Reed

13. “I was challenged to a fistfight by Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times writer, who is part of a feminist clique at the Times, which believes that Black men are the principal threat to the women of the world.”

— Ishmael Reed

14. “Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around.”

— Ishmael Reed

15. “Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own ego and cannot live well with other people and the world. They have lost the tune of life. They only live in cold thinking. Their feelings are deeply repressed while they attach themselves forlornly to the earth.”

— Ishmael Reed

16. “David Simon goes to the Jewish Weekly and said he’s made all this money, but he can’t enjoy it because of criticism by people like Ishmael Reed.”

— Ishmael Reed

17. “I walked out on American Gangster: this evil piece of dreck. Defenders of this junk say that these movies give Black actors jobs. So did “Birth of a Nation.””

— Ishmael Reed

18. “Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price’s tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history.”

— Ishmael Reed

19. “Native Americans were driven off their land. Lincoln even took part in the Black Hawk campaign against the Native Americans in Illinois. While they were being exterminated and driven off their land, Whites were collecting assets.”

— Ishmael Reed

20. “The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are referred to in the newspapers as blacks and African Americans must include Europe and Native America.”

— Ishmael Reed

21. “Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.”

— Ishmael Reed

22. “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.”

— Ishmael Reed

23. “No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.”

— Ishmael Reed

24. “I think Black intellectuals see too deeply. That’s the problem. It’s a cause of anxiety, because we see things differently.”

— Ishmael Reed

25. “The descendants of Holy Roman Empire monarchies became feeble-minded in the twentieth century, and after World War I had been done in by the democracies; some were kept on to entertain the tourists, like the one they have in England.”

— Ishmael Reed

26. “I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.”

— Ishmael Reed

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

— Ishmael Reed

28. “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.””

— Ishmael Reed

29. “The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.”

— Ishmael Reed

30. “I asked Joe Weixlmann why he would print a death threat like that in light of the fact that there are all of these armed ideological nuts wandering around loose. He said that for him, to “ice” someone means to reprimand them.”

— Ishmael Reed

31. “Do you think that Gwendolyn Brooks would give an award to someone who hated Black women, the lie that was circulated throughout New York and reached all the way down to Martinique where I was a guest Professor? The lie was circulated by people who don’t read my books.”

— Ishmael Reed

32. “Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.”

— Ishmael Reed

33. “I have Black guys who tell me they put my books on their bed stands to read at night like something for guidance or information. That really pleases me a lot. I think my work has changed some things. It’s changed me.”

— Ishmael Reed

34. “My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali’s style.”

— Ishmael Reed

35. “Given all of the anti-Muslim propaganda that’s being disseminated by The American Nazi media, you have to be careful. It can stress you out.”

— Ishmael Reed

36. “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.”

— Ishmael Reed

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

— Ishmael Reed

38. “All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree.”

— Ishmael Reed

39. “My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it’s like a session of the American Diabetic Association.”

— Ishmael Reed

40. “Another California study counted 30,000 substance abusers who are pregnant are White woman. So, The Wire paints the picture of drug addiction, drug dealing, and drug abuse as being a specifically a Black issue.”

— Ishmael Reed

41. “Americans are fickle. And what constitutes the enemy is always changing. Believe it or not, at one time Blacks were the favored model minority over Asian Americans.”

— Ishmael Reed

42. “I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.”

— Ishmael Reed

43. “I’ve always wondered why European politicians as a group seemed brighter than American politicians as a group. Maybe it’s becausemany American politicians have the race issue to fall back on. They become lazy, suspicious of innovative ideas, and as a result American institutions atrophy.”

— Ishmael Reed

44. “America is the smart-aleck adolescent who’s “been around” and has his own hot rod.”

— Ishmael Reed

45. “Yes. You see, it’s not 1 of those germs that break bleed suck gnaw or devour. It’s nothing we can bring into focus or categorize; once we call it 1 thing it forms into something else.”

— Ishmael Reed

46. “Americans will not tolerate wars that can’t be explained in simple terms of economics or the White man’s destiny.”

— Ishmael Reed

47. “There would be no Rock and Roll without Ike Turner, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, etc. Fake ghetto books and fake ghetto music. Elvis Presley, whom they idol, is merely a karaoke makeover of James Brown and Chuck Berry.”

— Ishmael Reed

48. “I wasn’t part of any sixties movement. I’m skeptical of movements. I’m part of the times that I’m in.”

— Ishmael Reed

49. “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.”

— Ishmael Reed

50. “He said he felt like the gut heart and lungs of Africa’s interior. He said he felt like the Kongo: “Land of the Panther.” He said he felt like “deserting his master,” as the Kongo is “prone to do.” He said he felt he could dance on a dime.”

— Ishmael Reed