Artist Quotes by Amiri Baraka

I had just been in some repressive situations - the black middle-class college scene and the crazy United States Air Force - and so…

— Amiri Baraka

what is lost because it is most precious what is most precious because it is lost

— Amiri Baraka

You have to get an individual who's willing to actually struggle with the system to change it. As long as you have people who…

— Amiri Baraka

I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.

— Amiri Baraka

I'm fully conscious all the time that I'm an American Negro, because it's part of my life. But I also know that if I…

— Amiri Baraka

The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world and themselves more completely. That's how…

— Amiri Baraka

Mao Zedong was a revolutionary. He made a revolution.

— Amiri Baraka

The films of Warhol, when they are about anything are about sucking people off. This can be high art, to people who are interested…

— Amiri Baraka

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

— Amiri Baraka

“Poems are bullshit unless they are teeth or trees or lemons piled on a step. Or black ladies dying of men leaving nickel hearts…

— Amiri Baraka

Thought is more important than art…To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even…

— Amiri Baraka

Jimmy Baldwin was not only a writer, an international literary figure: he was a man, spirit, voice - old and black and terrible as…

— Amiri Baraka

The future is always here in the past

— Amiri Baraka

I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes. Smell what fouled tunes come in to his breath. Love his…

— Amiri Baraka

The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into…

— Amiri Baraka