More from Ralph Ellison

  1. 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…
  2. 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…
  3. Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music : an obscene looting of a cultural expre…
  4. 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…
  5. 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…
  6. Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
  7. The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
  8. Education is all a matter of building bridges.

All Ralph Ellison quotes