Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
RALPH ELLISONYou start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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I blundered into writing.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISON