I think, probably, socially, in some ways New York may be the least American city. It represents too many things that Americans really don’t entirely want in their lives. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
New York, for decades, offered a perpetual series of ‘golden ages’ to artists. You constantly had to measure yourself against the best, and you had to watch them, which meant that your imagination and also your sense of what the market could stand got very, very sharp. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
New Yorkers know how to borrow wildly. You know, Louis Armstrong was not a New York musician. He went from New Orleans to Chicago to New York, and when he arrived here, he taught those New Yorkers. New York needs that infusion. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren’t anymore. I revered Yeats’s poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don’t go back to him again and again. I do go back to Emily Dickinson again and again. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Ralph Ellison’s essays were models for me when I began my life as a critic. Slipping cultural yokes and violating aesthetic boundaries, he made criticism high-stakes work, especially for a black critic. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
At the very least, noir offers an alternate reality – moments of real passion, a bleak code of honor, and a need for freedom amid corruption. At its best, noir offers a map of subversion. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Noir was a brainchild of the United States. And most of the creators of classic noir – novelists and screenwriters, directors and cameramen – were men. Women were their mysterious, sometimes villainous, always seductive objects of desire. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
My mind is stuffed with quotes. Lines, couplets, paragraphs, stanzas; Bessie Smith, Stevie Smith, Tin Pan Alley, rock and roll. They tease or lead or hurl me into a dream space of jostling languages that I need to bask in each day in order to write. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Noir has always shown that greed and chaos are as close as the company we work for or the politicians we vote for. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Noir is a court of human relations, and some crimes are beyond legal restitution. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
