"So she doesnt think Iʼm black enough. What does she want, a black-face comedian? [...] Maybe she wants to see me sweat coal tar, ink, shoe polish, graphite. What was I, a man or a natural resource?"
Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American writer, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.
"But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand."
"Lets not play these kids cheap; lets find out what they have that is a strength. What do they have that you can approach and build a bridge upon? Education is all a matter of building bridges, it seems to me."
"[T]here must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientist, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale."
"Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty."
"Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers lifes crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart."
"By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication."