Richard Wright Quotes

I forged more notes and my trips to the library became frequent. Reading grew into a passion. My first serious novel was Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. It made me see my boss, Mr. Gerald, and identify...

How oppression seems to hinder and stifle in the victim those very qualities of character which are so essential for an effective struggle against the oppressor. Then

You're trying to believe in yourself. And every time you try to find a way to live, your own mind stands in the way. You know why that is? It's because others have said you were bad and they made you...

I knew what was wrong with me, but I could not correct it. The words and actions ofwhite people were baffling signs to me. I was living in a culture and not a civilization and Icould learn how that cu...

If I should say that he is a victim of injustice, then I would be asking by implication for sympathy; and if one insists upon looking at this boy as a victim of injustice, he will be swamped by a feel...

In a boy like Bigger, young, unschooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American culture, this primitive fear and ecstasy were naked, exposed, unprotected by religion or a f...

In all my life— though surrounded by many people— I had not had a single satisfying, sustained relationship with another human being and, not having had any, I did not miss it. I made no demands whate...

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the matu...

My mother's suffering grew into as symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, th...

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

Then, first of all, let us admit that there is no such thing as objectivity, no such objective fact as objectivity. Objectivity is a fabricated concept, a synthetic intellectual construction...

These fantasies were no longer a reflection of my reaction to the white people, they were a part of my living, of my emotional life; they were a culture, a creed, a religion. The hostility of the whit...

They felt that it was much easier and safer to rob their own people, for they knew that white policemen never really searched diligently for Negroes who committed crimes against other Negroes.

This Court should not sit to fix punishment for this boy; it should sit to ponder why there are not more like him! And there are, Your Honor. If it were not for the backwaters of religion, gambling an...

Toward no one in the world did he feel any fear now, for he knew that fear was useless; and toward no one in the world did he feel any hate now, for he knew that hate would not help him. Though

And when I contemplated the area of No Man’s Land into which the Negro mind in America had been shunted I wondered if there had ever existed in all human history a more corroding and devastating attac...

When I tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever st...

America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of bl...

But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one's back was against the wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He commi...

Did you ever feel happy in church? Naw. I didn’t want to. Nobody but poor folks get happy in church. But you are poor, Bigger.Again Bigger’s eyes lit with a bitter and feverish pride. I ain’t that poo...