Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
RALPH ELLISONGood fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I am nobody but myself.
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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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I blundered into writing.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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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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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
RALPH ELLISON