Darryl Pinckney Quotes

Quotes about:

• When you are writing the kind of criticism you hope you're writing, everything depends on keeping your calm or your cool. You're trying to tell someone about something that they may know nothing about. They depend on you to read or interpret as best as you can.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Writing, Criticism, Trying

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 4, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

• Home is the place where there is somebody who does not wish you any pain.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Pain, Home, Wish

  Source: therumpus.net

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• You can get away with anything as long as it works.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Long, Get Away

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 4, 2016.

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• When you're writing fiction it's a heightened voice. You're trying to cast a spell, which isn't the same thing as trying to cast someone into it. You are creating a reality but it's a different sort of performance.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Writing, Reality, Voice

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 4, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

• As for the not-black black president issue - white people can imagine blacks worse off than them, no problem. And now they can imagine blacks better off, no problem. But they still can't imagine black people who are just like them. That's the real problem. That's racism. Not being able to believe that those others are actually just like you.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Real, Believe, White

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think at the beginning of one's writing life, negative reviews are what one does to get attention and stake out your territory. It's also often a mistake.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Mistake, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 4, 2016.

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• There's a class divide in black America that doesn't seem to trouble black Americans so much, but whites use it and exploit it. The progress of a few is allowed to stand for the progress of everyone. We can't afford that kind of disaffection at the moment.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Class, America, Black

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Girlfriend, Powerful, Stories

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• Hillary certainly needs the black vote, and Democrats need it. She's not doing anything too soon; she's raising her money and not wanting any issues to come back and bite her later. The black vote will be crucial for Hillary and so will the women's vote.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Black, Vote, Democrat

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Being a liberal progressive has been demonized as anti-white or overly on the side of blacks. There's nothing that can be done about that; it's just where we are in the history of our perceptions.

  Darryl Pinckney

  White, Perception, Done

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Criticism shouldn't be a performance that upstages the work it's talking about.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Talking, Criticism, Working It

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 4, 2016.

  5 Copy quote

• Identity has several parts, and the self needs to expand. Black youth should be encouraged to have as many parts or as rich an identity as possible. It's a form of allowing them to be curious about the world.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Self, Black Youth, Identity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

• Economic justice is not just something blacks are crying out for; whites are desperate for it, too. But in the public imagination, the face of poverty is black. In all actuality, the face of poverty is white.

  Darryl Pinckney

  White, Justice, Imagination

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• In the 19th century, Berlin was called the German Chicago. Or Chicago was called the American Berlin because they were sort of new cities or new powerhouses.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Cities, Chicago, Berlin

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 4, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

• If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away.

  Darryl Pinckney

  People, Over You, Our Family

  Source: therumpus.net

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• What happened after World War I was disgraceful. Most veterans, like my great-uncle, were squashed back into place. Congress couldn't pass an anti-lynching bill. The World War II generation, though, wasn't going to take it.

  Darryl Pinckney

  War, World, Veteran

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I can see Obama trying to be the president who suggests solutions for everyone who has experienced economic hardship.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Trying, President, Hardship

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Obama can't be everything to everyone. He changed. He did. I never thought I'd hear Obama say, "Let's go back to nuclear arms," but he did. In the meantime, the clear and present danger is the Republicans in the Senate. A lot of politics isn't heroic, it's as day-to-day as our lives themselves. We always want to make the Byronic choices, but Byron himself was not Byronic all the time either.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Choices, Heroic, Republican

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• If you're bored, your readers will be bored. If you're faking it, you won't get the kind of readers you want.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Bored, Kind

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think that the Vietnam War era is important because we tend not to want to revisit it. For black people, there was the temptation of disaffection. People looked for alternative ways to express themselves personally and politically, people doubted the system, and there was the terrible kind of division in black America between a radical leadership and a much older, compromising leadership.

  Darryl Pinckney

  War, Thinking, America

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Home, Black, Communist

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• People from Europe and people from Africa encountered one another long before the invention of "Europe" and "Africa" and "white people" and "black people."

  Darryl Pinckney

  Long, People, Black

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It's not nothing when you're abroad and you don't have a washing machine.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Machines, Washing Machines, Washing

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 4, 2016.

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• It's important for the progressive youth to remember that the agenda you set today is the agenda that will matter tomorrow. If you are engaged and active, it means you are one of the lucky ones and you are awake. Most people are not there yet.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Mean, People, Important

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The point of Berlin was that it seemed that only people like you ran the city. You never ran into people who weren't like you - especially when you lived as that kind of American in Berlin connected to the arts.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Art, Cities, People

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 4, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

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