Quotes from Richard Wright

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

He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough.

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

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

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 the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.

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

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.

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

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.

I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom

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

All literature is protest.

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

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

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 was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it

Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.

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.

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

Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible... Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.

Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.

Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.

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