Richard Wright Quotes

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target

All literature is protest.

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.

Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.

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.

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

Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like livin' in jail.

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

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

I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...].

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

Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.

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.

It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em.

The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.

The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.

A writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.

If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.

I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em...

Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires

....I wondered if there had been a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination.

If you posses enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone.

Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days that had yet to come.

The world of most men is given to them by their culture..

I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.

absolute power is corrupting

We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours.

You can't make me do nothing but die!