Explore Quotes by Darryl Pinckney

Manhattan was the capital of the twentieth century for black writers, artists, and intellectuals as much as it was for their white counterparts.

Baldwin gave expression to the longings of blacks in exalted prose. He was embraced, in the tradition of Negro Firsterism, even by those who never sat down with a book, as our preeminent literary spokesman, whether he liked it or not. Neither athlete nor entertainer, but nevertheless a star.

'Go Tell It on the Mountain,' its pages heavy with sinners brought low and prayers groaning on the wind, scared me when I read it as a teenager.

I carried props into the subway - the latest 'Semlotext(e),' a hefty volume of the Frankfurt School - so that the employed would not get the wrong idea or, more to the point, the usual idea about me.

Harlem's streets lead backward, into history, straight to a work such as 'This Was Harlem.'

The city - as the theater of experience, the refuge, the hiding place - has, in turn, been replaced by an abstraction, the fast lane. In the fast lane, the passive observer reduces everything - streets, people, rock lyrics, headlines - to landscape. Every night holds magical promises of renewal. But burnout is inevitable, like some law of physics.

Eventually, I gave up my sublet in Berlin and stayed in England for a long time - for about 20 years.

Unfortunately for me, I was one of these people who took a long time to learn that the material at his feet was fine.

I wrote 'Black Deutschland' very quickly one summer, probably because I had a lot of it in pieces and fragments sitting around over the years as false starts or notes.

When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused.

The draining away of James Baldwin's magic was a drama much discussed in the years leading up to his death in 1987 at the age of sixty-three.

Jean Toomer is a phantom of the Harlem Renaissance. Pick up any general study of the literature written by Afro-Americans, and there is the name of Jean Toomer. In biographies and memoirs of Harlem Renaissance figures, his name is invoked as if he had been one of the sights along Lenox Avenue.

Tone is everything.

Black America has always felt itself divided into two classes: the mucky-mucks and the folk.

As long as white newspapers were unwilling or unable to attack 'anti-Negro' forces or to air the views of black reformers, there was a service black newspapers could provide.

None of the black abolitionist newspapers, the first of which appeared in 1827, was in existence after the Civil War.

The history of black people in Manhattan is a story of people getting pushed farther uptown as land acquires new uses and increases in value.

The name James Baldwin had been around the house for as long as I could remember and meant almost as much as that of Martin Luther King.

The novel and the film of 'The Color Purple' are both works of the imagination that make claim to historical truth.

Once upon a time, I was morbidly sensitive about the impertinence born of sociology. Taxi drivers would not stop for me after dark; white girls jogged to keep ahead of my shadow thrown at their heels by the amber street lamps. Part of me didn't blame them, but most of me was hurt.

Paule Marshall does not let the black women in her fiction lose. While they lose friends, lovers, husbands, homes, or jobs, they always find themselves.