The Harlem of my books was never meant to be real; I never called it real; I just wanted to take it away from the white man if only in my books.
Martyrs are needed to create incidents. Incidents are needed to create revolutions. Revolutions are needed to create progress.
There is an indomitable quality within the human spirit that cannot be destroyed; a face deep within the human personality that is impregnable to all assaults.
Man cannot live without some knowledge of the purpose of life. If he can find no purpose in life he creates one in the inevitability of death.
American violence is public life, it’s a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.
It seemed so illogical to punish some poor criminal for doing something that civilization taught him how to do so he could have something that civilization taught him how to want. It seemed to him as wrong as if they had hung the gun that shot the man.
I would sit in my room and become hysterical about the wild incredible story I was writing. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.
Growth is the surviving influence in all our lives. The tree will send up its trunk in thick profusion from land burned black by atom bombs. Children will grow from poverty and filth and oppression and develop honor, integrity, contribute to all mankind.
Our highest ambition is to be included in the stream of American life, to be permitted to “play the game” as any other American; and is opposed to anything that aids in the exclusion; the face may be Africa, but the heart has the beat of Wall Street.
I grew to manhood in the Ohio State Penitentiary.
Democracy is not tolerance. Democracy is a prescribed way of life erected on the premise that all men are created equal.
Don’t ever lean your whole weight on happiness, Jimmy. You fall too hard too hard when it gives away.
If you’re a police officer then I want to report that Chink Charlie pushed me out of the window to my death, but God placed the body of Christ on the ground to break my fall.” “It was a basket of bread,” the sergeant corrected. “The body of Christ,” Reverend Short maintained.
It was the code of Harlem for one brother to help another lie to white cops.
Colored folks in Harlem didn’t want to get caught by the police whether they had done anything or not.
They believed in Black Power. They’d give it a trial anyway. Everything else had failed. What did they have to lose? And they might win. Who knew? The whale swallowed Jonah. Moses split the Red Sea. Christ rose from the dead. Lincoln freed the slaves. Hitler killed six million Jews. The Africans had got to rule – in some parts of Africa, anyway. The Americans and the Russians have shot the moon. Some joker has made a plastic heart. Anything is possible.
You bring the list to me at midnight. I’ll be waiting down by the Harlem River underneath the subway extension to the Polo Grounds in my cah, and I’ll pay you right then and there. It will be dark and deserted at that time of night and nobody’ll see you.” Barry.
The white folks had sure brought their white to work with them that morning.
For he reached the conclusion that everything he had ever seen, or had ever done, or had ever dreamed of doing would in the end betray him. That no matter what you had been, or ever hoped to be, a foot of greenish vomit hanging from your teeth would make you much the same as any other bastard.
Jealous man can’t gamble, scared man can’t win,” the stick man crooned.