Richard Wright Quotations

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

I'd like to see the bay cleaned up before I die.

The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.

The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.

Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.

Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

She wanted to tell her side of the story, but they (prosecutors) were hamstringing me.

Nobody has any confidence. Nobody wants to buy anything and if they do buy anything they're wrong within about 10 minutes. It's fairly gloomy.

I would do anything to have a recording of that two-and-a-half hour meeting.

If this isn't a waiver of attorney-client privilege, I don't know what is.

He has signed a contract with us and I heard on Monday that his work permit has been received. We were expecting him to join us at any time.

I think the difference between our defense from last year and this year is that last year we had big, strong linemen, and this year our linemen are smaller, but we make up for it with our speed.

You'll be amazed how far your money will go,

We really wanted to play hard because of Clay after he got injured. And everybody really took it personal because he's the leader of our defense.

We're not sure how long it will be before Willie can join us because of the community work, but we plan to stick with him because we think he is a decent lad who just got in with the wrong crowd.

We knew about that. We want to get him over to join up with the squad and he can travel back for the court case.

We could speculate all day as to what they talked about.

Blues, spirituals, and folk tales recounted from mouth to mouth . . . all these formed the channels through which the racial wisdom flowed.

First thing is, are you dealing with a liar or not?

There's one word for it -- carnage. It's horrible.

As a rule, memories fade with the passage of time, instead of remembering with specificity but providing no dates or times as backup. It was the first time, to our knowledge, these things have ever been said.

This complaint has been pending for nearly four years. We have satisfied every provision of the settlement. This matter is now behind us, and we are glad to have the issue finally resolved.

They still let the man get on the stand and lie.

They didn't even know about the ski school until Mary told them. They didn't even know about that.

They record that which helps them and not that which doesn't.

It's not without its hiccups. You don't go in expecting things to always work smoothly, but Romanians are geniuses at what we might consider to be jury-rigged solutions. The power plant might be held together by paper clips and bubble gum, but it works.

It's not without its hiccups, ... You don't go in expecting things to always work smoothly, but Romanians are geniuses at what we might consider to be jury-rigged solutions. The power plant might be held together by paper clips and bubble gum, but it works.

It's the longest argument I've ever heard. It's a filibuster. As long as he is talking, I can't talk.

It's always difficult to pare down so many books. There's only room for five on the raft. So there was give and take. There has to be compromise, but it was very amicable. We had a fair degree of consensus. And we're happy with the choices. We think these five books represent the best of Canadian fiction this year.

It's routine practice. There's nothing unique or unusual about it.

It's definitely no holiday. You get through an enormous amount of work. The sessions are intense and you are at it every day.

It looked like a tsunami with hurricane winds.

The FBI agent claimed he knew of such a call, and he wanted you to admit it.

I'm just trying to get gas for all the vehicles in case of an emergency.

In my judgment, he really did need an attorney.

All he knows is he gives the money to Lance (Malone). He presumes Lance is passing it on, rather than stealing it.

All the formalities, including a work permit and a Tongan passport, have been completed and he is all set to join us in the near future.

It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them, kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.

I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em...

At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the suffering of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful.

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.

We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land. We smelted iron, danced, made music and folk poems; we sculpted, worked in glass, spun cotton and wool, wove baskets and cloth. We invented a medium of exchange, mined silver and gold, made pottery and cutlery, we fashioned tools and utensils of brass, bronze, ivory, quartz, and granite. We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.

What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true? I could think of nothing. And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason.

I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...].

I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate. But to feel that there was feeling denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else hurt, wounded me. I had a new hunger.

It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets, you usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.

Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. [...] It had been only through books - at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions - that I had managed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books; consequently, my belief in books had risen more out of a sense of desperation than from any abiding conviction of their ultimate value.

Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible... Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.

In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the ells and the screams that filled the air.

I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.

I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom

Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?

there are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed

Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.

It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...

All literature is protest.

Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.

Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like livin' in jail.

But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.

I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness

Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!