Richard Wright

"With a twitching nose A dog reads a telegram On a wet tree trunk."

"Burning autumn leaves, I yearn to make the bonfire Bigger and bigger."

"A sleepless spring night: Yearning for what I never had And for what never was."

"In a drizzling rain, In a flower shop’s doorway, A girl sells herself"

"A slow autumn rain: The sad eyes of my mother Fill a lonely night."

"A man who worships in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church lives, psychologically, in a burning and continuous moment that never ends: the present is ever-lasting; the past is telescoped into the now; there is no future and at any moment Christ may come again and then the anxious tension of time will be no more.... [My grandmother] lived with all of us, yet, psychologically, she hovered somewhere off in space.... Always she seemed to be peeping out of Heaven into the world while living in the world."

"He did not feel that he was stealing, for the cleaver, the radio, the money, and the typewriter were all on the same level of value, all meant the same thing to him. They were the serious toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him, branded him guilty."

"Maybe anything's right, he mumbled. Yes, if the world as men had made it was right, then anything else was right, any act a man took to satisfy himself, murder, theft, torture.He straightened with a start. What was happening to him? ... He was going to do something, but what? Yes, he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some nameless thing."

"He would go there and clear up everything, make a statement. What statement? He did not know. He was the statement, and since it was all so clear to him, surely he would be able to make it clear to others."

"“Where could he find such experiences, such spheres of existence? In the main, he accepted the kind of world that the Bible claimed existed; but, for the sufferings, terrors, accidental births, and meaningless deaths of that world, he rejected the Biblical prescriptions of repentance, prayer, faith and grace. He was persuaded that what started on this earth had to be rounded off and somehow finished here.”"

"The moment we act as if it's true, then it's true."

"Negroes, as they enter our culture, are going to inherit the problems we have, but with a difference. They are outsiders and they are going to know that they have these problems. They are going to be self‑conscious; they are going to be gifted with a double vision, for, being Negroes, they are going to be both inside and outside of our culture at the same time. Every emotional and cultural convulsion that ever shook the heart and soul of Western man will shake them. Negroes will develop unique and specially defined psychological types. They will become psychological men, like the Jews . . . They will not only be Americans or Negroes; they will be centers of knowing, so to speak . . . The political, social, and psychological consequences of this will be enormous . . ."

"Oh, Christ their disease had reached out and claimed him too. He had been subverted by the contagion of the lawless; he had been defeated by that which he had sought to destroy."

"Don't think I'm so odd and strange ... I'm not.... I'm legion ... I've lived alone, but I'm everywhere."

"Nothing.... Alone a man is nothing.....I wish I had some way to give the meaning of my life to others.... To make a bridge from man to man.... We must find some way of being good to ourselves.... Man is all we've got."

"You are your own law, so you'll be your own judge."

"the most powerful and celebrated statement we have yet had of what it means to be a Negro in America is unquestionably Richard Wright's Native Son. The feeling which prevailed at the time of its publication was that such a novel, bitter, uncompromising, shocking, gave proof, by its very existence, of what strides might be taken in a free democracy; and its indisputable success, proof that Americans were now able to look full in the face without flinching the dreadful facts ... Such a book, we felt with pride, could never have been written before-which was true. Nor could it be written today. It bears already the aspect of a landmark; for Bigger [Thomas] and his brothers have undergone yet another metamorphosis; they have been accepted in baseball leagues and by colleges hitherto exclusive; and they have made a most favorable appearance on the national screen. We have yet to encounter, nevertheless, a report so indisputably authentic, or one that can begin to challenge this most significant novel. ... In the thirties, swallowing Marx whole, we discovered the Worker and realized-I should think with some relief-that the aims of the Worker and the aims of the Negro were one. ... As for this New Negro, it was Wright who became his most eloquent spokesman; and his work, from its beginning, is most clearly committed to the social struggle. ... Recording his days of anger he has also nevertheless recorded, as no Negro before him had ever done, that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when they speak of the Negro: that fantastic and fearful image which we have lived with since the first slave fell beneath the lash. This is the significance of Native Son and also, unhappily, its overwhelming limitation…Native Son finds itself at length so trapped by the American image of Negro life and by the American necessity to find the ray of hope that it cannot pursue its own implications."

"Richard went to Paris in 1946, when I was 22, he was 38. Now, it took me a long time; I had to get to be much older to realize something. I didn't realize it that day at all. I was not born in Mississippi; I was born in New York. And I did not leave Mississippi to go to Chicago. And endure all that. I was much too young to realize what I was looking at really. But, that's a journey. To go from Mississippi to Chicago to New York to Paris in 38 years is amazing. You might as well have walked all that distance, it's almost that remarkable."

"He was much more stern and realistic than I tend to be. I'm not unrealistic, except in the sense that some things are so unpleasant I need to alter them a bit."

"He came like a sledgehammer, like a giant out of the mountain with a sledgehammer, writing with a sledgehammer..."

"I clearly remember my introduction to the African American heritage. I was in the school sanatorium with a bad attack of the flu when the headmistress came to see me, bringing copies of Wright's Native Son, Black Boy and Trevor Huddleston's Naught For Your Comfort, I could not put any of the books down."

"Most of the writers with whom I was most impressed were the French and Russian writers of another period. The one American writer who stood out to me was Richard Wright-and Dreiser. I took to their naturalism. I was able to understand so much of the country through them. Certainly I understood Black America because of Richard Wright."

"Wright was an American phenomenon. Lenin, during the Russian Revolution, looked at the jubilant former serfs who'd changed the course of history. Wouldn't he be thinking also of one like this one when he dreamed of creating a new man? Phenomena-especially Black ones-can't be measured by ordinary standards. Perhaps this is what W. E. B. DuBois had in mind when he said, "We struggle not only for the right of Blacks to be right but also for their right to be wrong!" Wright was a prodigious reader and he never failed to credit the extraordinary 10-year leap from semi-illiterate Black serf to literary giant to his discovery of Marx, Engels and Lenin, which subsequently led to his membership in the Communist Party. Mississippi had taught him to despise capitalist exploitation and injustice."

"I would say that Dick was my closest friend. We had a small group, Dick Wright, Chester Himes and myself and we lived and enjoyed French life."

"Kierkegaard is one of the great writers of today. He is one of the men who, during the last twenty or thirty years, modern civilization has recognized as a man whose writings express the modern temperament and the modern personality. And Dick assured me that he was reading Kierkegaard because everything he read in Kierkegaard he had known before. What he was telling me was that he was a black man in the United States and that gave him an insight into what today is the universal opinion and attitude of the modern personality. I believe that is a matter that is not only black studies, but is white studies too. I believe that that is some form of study which is open to any university: Federal City College, Harvard, etc. It is not an ethnic matter. I knew Wright well enough to know that he meant it. I didn’t ask him much because I thought he meant me to understand something. And I understood it. I didn’t have to ask him about that. What there was in Dick’s life, what there was in the experience of a black man in the United States in the 1930s that made him understand everything that Kierkegaard had written before he had read it and the things that made Kierkegaard the famous writer that he is today? That is something that I believe has to be studied."

"In an era when fiction with political intent was widely condemned, Wright’s haunting novel, with its clear political message, made me unafraid to write a political novel. It also showed me that presenting horrifying actions can serve a powerful literary purpose, and that “shocking” can be high praise."

"I was preoccupied with books by black people that approached the subject, but I always missed some intimacy, some direction, some voice. Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright-all of whose books I admire enormously-I didn't feel were telling me something. I thought they were saying something about it or us that revealed something about us to you, to others, to white people, to men. Just in terms of the style, I missed something in the fiction that I felt in a real sense in the music and poetry of black artists. When I began writing I was writing as though there was nobody in the world but me and the characters, as though I was talking to them, or us, and it just had a different sound to it."

"Richard Wright’s outstanding characteristics are two seemingly opposite tendencies. One is an overwhelming need for association and integration with humanity at large. The other is a tragic, highly individualized loneliness. Except that he is a Negro in 20th century America he might have been a lyric poet. Whenever he describes the life he wants for mankind he rises to great heights of lyric beauty. At the same time when he doubts that a new life can ever be achieved he writes with the same beauty but in tragic despair. Wright wants a new world; men working freely together in social relationships that not only realize a complete personality but develop every potential and result in new associations and new men altogether. He wants to share a common life, not in a regimented sense but in a free interchange of ideas and experience; a relationship which will be the blending of a common belief and a solidarity of ideals. He wants a life in which basic emotions are shared; in which common memory forms a common past; in which collective hope reflects a national future. He has a vision of life where man can reveal his destiny as man by grappling with the world and getting from it the satisfactions he feels he must have. He wants a life where man’s inmost nature and emotional capacities will be used. He has a passionate longing to belong, to be identified with the world at large; he wants the "deep satisfaction of doing a good job in common with others." He doesn’t want a society where he is separate as Negro, but one where he is just another man."

"So far only Wright has positively revealed the state of mind of a people bursting with energy, untroubled by feudal remains or a feudal past, soaked to the bone in traditions of individual freedom and free association—traditions constantly held before them as the basis of their civilization, yet utterly unrealized in the face of automation and the threat of atomic annihilation."

"By the 1940s there was Richard Wright, a gifted novelist ... His autobiography of 1937, Black Boy, gave endless insights: for instance, how blacks were set against one another, when he told how he was prodded to fight another black boy for the amusement of white men."