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.
RICHARD WRIGHTThe 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.
More Richard Wright Quotes
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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?
RICHARD WRIGHT -
If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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.
RICHARD WRIGHT






