Ishmael Reed Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity.
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They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
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I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
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Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
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Arendt did have a certain snobbishness, though in some of her writing she expressed more democratic attitudes.
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Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.
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Tell your idea to whomever will listen, and you'll get valuable market feedback before writing a single line of code.
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When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
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I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.
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Do activities you're passionate about - which make your heart and soul feel perky - including things like working out, cooking, painting, writing, yoga, hiking, walking, swimming, being in nature, being around art, or reading inspiring books.
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Imagination is an infinite resource that cannot be diminished by overuse or underuse.
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I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
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I started writing my own things when I was about 8.
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I used to be opposed to collaboration, and that's probably why the music in the past wasn't as good. Writing with other people, especially the great writers that I've had the privilege to write with, it activates something in your mind that you wouldn't use alone.
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So it was just a case of getting a bunch of songs that I had been writing for years but hadn't recorded together, and the result was My Own Best Enemy.
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With memoir, you have the clay of your life to work with. When you're writing a novel, you have to make the clay first.
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I was going to say that writing is about disclosure and acting is about obfuscation, but that's such a little lie. Both of them are about obfuscation and masking oneself.
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There's nothing more stressful than your stomach growling. But interestingly enough, some of my best writing came when I was poor and hungry - living off water and oatmeal, mind clear.
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I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.
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No one can say 'He jests at scars who never felt a wound' for I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable. If any man is safe from the danger of under-estimating this adversary, I am that man.
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Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
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I have a suicide impulse.
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The wing structure of the hornet, in relation to its weight, is not suitable for flight, but he does not know this and flies anyway.
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Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
