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. – 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. – Darryl Pinckney
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. – 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. – Darryl Pinckney
If the sensitive washout has no taste for extreme gestures, total self-destruction, then his hope for singularity rests in his voice. Tone is everything. – 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. – 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. – 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. – Darryl Pinckney
The nameless loser in Jay McInerney’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ is going to the dogs like a gentleman. He is too smart to blame anyone for the impasse he has come to, hip enough to know he does not know enough, too sophisticated to masquerade as an anti-hero. – Darryl Pinckney
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. – Darryl Pinckney
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. – Darryl Pinckney
I know black kids who don’t even know any other black kids except their cousins. And that’s enough. You wouldn’t look at these kids and say that they are Uncle Toms or self-hating or fleeing or trying to be white, given the culture in which they live, which is very natural to them as kids. – Darryl Pinckney
Harlem’s streets lead backward, into history, straight to a work such as ‘This Was Harlem.’ – Darryl Pinckney
Harlem exists in retrospect, in the memory of grandparents or elderly cousins, those ‘old-timers’ ever ready with their geysers of remembered scenes. The legends of ‘Black Mecca’ are preserved in the glossy musicals of Times Square and in texts of virtually every kind. – Darryl Pinckney
Steven Spielberg’s ‘The Color Purple’ might as well have been about a bunch of dancing eggplants for all it has to say about black history. – 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. – Darryl Pinckney
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. – Darryl Pinckney
Unfortunately for me, I was one of these people who took a long time to learn that the material at his feet was fine. – Darryl Pinckney
Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley’s recent ‘Pictures from the Water Trade.’ – Darryl Pinckney
I had a lot of notes and fragments and observations that never amounted to anything. After the Wall had gone down, so many people were writing about Berlin, I didn’t have the same urgency or feel enough authority. – Darryl Pinckney
When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused. – Darryl Pinckney
I’d waste a holiday trying to set a story in this new place I’d visit, whereas I would never write a story about Indianapolis. – Darryl Pinckney
The novel and the film of ‘The Color Purple’ are both works of the imagination that make claim to historical truth. – Darryl Pinckney
Eventually, I gave up my sublet in Berlin and stayed in England for a long time – for about 20 years. – Darryl Pinckney