Richard Wright Quotes

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

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

In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness.

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.

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

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.

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.

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