Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values. Ralph Ellison Read Quote
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike. Ralph Ellison Read Quote
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. Ralph Ellison Read Quote
The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life. Ralph Ellison Read Quote
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear. Ralph Ellison Read Quote
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by. Ralph Ellison Read Quote
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale. Ralph Ellison Read Quote
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy. Ralph Ellison Read Quote
