Quotes from Richard Wright

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.

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

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.

Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.

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

I'd like to see the bay cleaned up before I die.

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.

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

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.

Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.

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

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

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