Richard Wright

“You can't make me do nothing but die!”

— Richard Wright

All literature is protest.

— Richard Wright

“absolute power is corrupting”

— Richard Wright

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

— Richard Wright

It's becoming very much like 1979 again.

— Richard Wright

“You look like an accident going somewhere to happen”

— Richard Wright

“He had been defeated by that which he had sought to destroy.”

— Richard Wright

“176 Winter rain at night Sweetening the taste of bread And spicing the soup.”

— Richard Wright

“Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.”

— Richard Wright

“We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours.”

— Richard Wright

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

— Richard Wright

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

— Richard Wright

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

— Richard Wright

Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do…

— Richard Wright

“The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do…

— Richard Wright

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a…

— Richard Wright

“…I wondered if there had been a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial…

— Richard Wright

“There was a hunger for power reaching out of the senses of man and trying to say something in the symbols of…

— Richard Wright

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

— Richard Wright

“You asked me questions nobody ever asked me before. You knew that I was a murderer two times over, but you treated…

— Richard Wright

“would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger of life that gnaws in…

— Richard Wright

“There were many more folk ditties, some mean, others filthy, all of them cruel. No one ever thought of questioning our right…

— Richard Wright

Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance…

— Richard Wright

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and…

— Richard Wright

What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true? I could think of nothing. And, slowly, it was…

— Richard Wright

“Cross felt that at the heart of all political movements the concept of the basic inequality of man was enthroned and practiced,…

— Richard Wright

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I…

— Richard Wright

“Bob had been caught by the white death, the threat of which hung over every male black in the South. I had…

— Richard Wright

I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate. But to feel that there was feeling denied me, that…

— Richard Wright

“I knew what was wrong with me, but I could not correct it. The words and actions of white people were baffling…

— Richard Wright

“Slowly he lifted his hands in the darkness and held them in mid-air, the fingers spread weakly open. If he reached out…

— Richard Wright

“The hostility of the whites had become so deeply implanted in my mind and feelings that it had lost direct connection with…

— Richard Wright

“Maybe man is nothing in particular,' Cross said gropingly. 'Maybe that's the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all.…

— Richard Wright

“My imaginings, of course, had no objective value whatever. My spontaneous fantasies lived in my mind because I felt completely helpless in…

— Richard Wright

“I knew what was wrong with me, but I could not correct it. The words and actions of white people were baffling…

— Richard Wright

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less…

— Richard Wright

“If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to…

— Richard Wright

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

— Richard Wright

“Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality. --Richard Wright to William Faulkner”

— Richard Wright

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

— Richard Wright