Ishmael Reed Quotes
No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
Quotes to Explore
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Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.
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I can't say anything I don't love about Seattle.
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I wrote my first novel in eighth grade for a boy named Kenny on whom I had an unrequited crush and who sat behind me in social studies.
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Food can change anything.
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I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
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I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.
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I don't fear anything now.
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I love bookstores and booksellers. In my novel 'Dirty Martini,' I thanked over 3,000 booksellers by name in the back matter.
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When you get into the granny era, you're lucky to get anything.
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I don't do anything just 'cause nothing else is happening, or for money.
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I don't want to be known as the Hilton heiress, because I didn't do anything for that.
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Lebanon is a Syrian protectorate. The Lebanese dare not do anything without the approval of Damascus.
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Would I have traded 'Homeland' for anything else? No. Would I trade 'Billions' for anything else? No.
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I'd never discuss anything confidential.
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Word of mouth travels faster than anything else.
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The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.
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I don't think anybody ever saw anybody taking anything.
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Anything I do, I want to do it well.
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My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.
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If you want to be happy... You will be.
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Our writers are full of cliches just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one and had better be removed.
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There is no way that the heart-lung machine could have been devised and developed other than through studies on living creatures.
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I firmly believe that if you help a woman, then you educate a child, you help the family. Because women are very focused on health care and education and on the family. So if you help a woman, you help the family, you help the village, you help the country. And so empowering women is a very important part of moving, not just women forward, but the economy of the nation forward. Particularly in very substandard nations.
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No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
