Author

Identity is made up of lots of different things now. Different colors and patterns stand out at different times. Different instruments in the symphony of being are more distinct than others at different times.

From Darryl Pinckney

For a long time, Nella Larsen was the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance. In the late 1920s, she published two sophisticated novels, 'Quicksand' and 'Passing,' and then her writing life came to an end. She died in obscurity in 1964.

From Darryl Pinckney

I was a slow and lazy reader as a kid. 'The Prince and the Pauper' was the only non-school book I would read, over and over, between television, records and radio, until I picked up my aunt's copy of 'In Cold Blood' and she didn't ask for it back.

From Darryl Pinckney

The city - as the theater of experience, the refuge, the hiding place - has, in turn, been replaced by an abstraction, the fast lane.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.

From Darryl Pinckney

The history of blacks is complicated, fragmented, disturbing to contemplate - not a neat trail of challenges met or of felled trees blocking the path to the mountain top.

From Darryl Pinckney

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

From Darryl Pinckney

In the years after World War I, blacks began to migrate to the North and its imagined freedoms in great numbers - 'Russian' came to mean a black who had rushed from the South.

From Darryl Pinckney

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.

From Darryl Pinckney

'High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.'

From Darryl Pinckney

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.

From Darryl Pinckney

Darryl Pinckney

Notable Quotes

Authors with Similar Views

Marcus Samuelsson

David Levering Lewis

Taj Mahal

Tessa Thompson

Morgan Freeman

Authors with Opposing Views

Agnes Obel

Confucius

Daniel Boulud

Donald Glover

Eugene Jarecki