Quote #1
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
More from Ralph Ellison
- Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself ou…
- Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music : an obscene looting of a cultural expre…
- I am a novelist, not an activist... But I think that no one who reads what I write or who listens to my lectures can doubt that I am enlist…
- America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophec…
- By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to hav…
- Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
- Education is all a matter of building bridges.
- Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.