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All Y Quotes

“You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy." "Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening.”

“You can’t write, yet you learned to hunt, to survive. How?” I paused with my foot on the threshold. “That’s what happens when you’re responsible for lives other than your own, isn’t it? You do what you have to do.” He was still sitting on the table, still straddling that inner line between the here and now and wherever he’d had to go in his mind to endure the fight with the Bogge. I met his feral and glowing stare. “You aren’t what I expected—for a human.”

“You can't write, yet you learned to hunt, to survive. How?' I paused with my foot on the threshold. 'That's what happens when you're responsible for lives other than your own, isn't it? You do what you have to do.' He was still sitting on the table, still straddling the inner line between the here and now and wherever he'd had to go in his mind to endure the fight with the Bogge. I met his feral and glowing stare. 'You aren't what I expected- for a human,' he said. I didn't reply. And he didn't say good-bye as I walked out.”

“You can t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?”

“You can take a book to the beach without worrying about sand getting in its works. You can take it to bed without being nervous about it falling to the floor should you nod off. You can spill coffee on it. You can sit on it. You can put it down on a table, open to the page you're reading, and when you pick it up a few days later it will still be exactly as you left it. You never have to be concerned about plugging a book into an outlet or having its battery die.”

“You can take a cub from the savannah as they have, and raise it like a pet if you like. In a cage, as some do, or running free like Paddy. You can feed it fresh meat so it never learns to hunt and brush its coat so it carries a human smell wherever it goes—but know that what you’ve done is twist something natural into something else. And you can never trust on unnatural thing. - Charles Clutterbuck”

“You can take a look at the enrollment at major institutions of higher learning. It's 65% female, 35% male. One of the reasons is, men don't want to go there anymore.But this is a manifestation... Remember our old buddy James Brown addressing men, said that it's time to shape up or ship out. He said we have got to stop this business of making fun of men who "throw like girls."”

“You can take All the Drama in your world, put that in a Blender . . . AND . . . I will take All the Drama in mine and put that into the same Blender . . . Out will come a Shot Glass full of your Drama . . . while I will be making Milk Shake After Milk Shake . . . So Deal with It”

“You can take away my anger, my fear, my fury, even my pain, but I could never live with myself if I’m not the one to bring that demon to justice. You’re all the family I have left, Serwa, and I pledged myself to you when I was a man-child of twenty-one years. Now, as a man of centuries, that responsibility hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s only gotten stronger.”