Richard Wright Quotes

He lay still, his bloodshot eyes staring blankly before him, and drifted into dreams of his problems...

The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungere...

....I wondered if there had been a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of m...

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

there are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gathe...

...the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or...

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

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

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

I had written a book of short stories which was published under the title of "Uncle Tom's Children"....

They argued about the weather, sports, sex, war, race, politics, and religion; neither of them knew ...

At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life...

A man will seek to express his relation to the stars; but when a man's consciousness has been rivete...

Out of the magazines I read came a passionate call for the experiences of the disinherited, and ther...

...it was no longer a matter of whether I would steal or lie or murder; it was a simple, urgent matt...

I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a...

Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night t...

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how fa...

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

I would write:"The soft melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the spli...

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

The artist and the politician stand at opposite poles. The artist enhances life by his prolonged con...

Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made the...

Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answe...

I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, hear...

I felt that it was unfair that my lack of a few pounds of flesh should deprive me of a chance at a g...

I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the im...

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

If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in all the neighborhoods of the nation,...

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their live...

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

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

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. Wha...

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

Rather, I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, b...

You can't make me do nothing but die!

Every decent man in America ought to swoon with joy for the opportunity to crush with his heel the w...

If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we would call it injustice, but there were ...

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

One walks along a street and strays unknowingly from one's path; one then looks up and suddenly for ...

absolute power is corrupting

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

Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards day...

If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on ea...

Maybe man is nothing in particular,' Cross said gropingly. 'Maybe that's the terror of it. Man may b...