Best 35 quotes of Kiese Laymon on MyQuotes

Black is not a vice. Nor is segregation a virtue.

First of all, the novel should be a critique of the novels that have come before it in a language that broadens the audience of American literature. Second, it's really got to be invested in a number of what-if questions.

I allude to Back to the Future in the 1985 story to let folks know it was an inspiration and because it literally was the most time-travelly bit of pop culture we had in the mid 80's. I can talk about their tools for considering change. First, the book is metafictive in a traditional sense where I'm showing and telling the reader that the act of writing and reading is a reflexive way to push boundaries of real and literal time travel. Writers and readers are time travellers. The question is what we do with that time we traveled when we leave a book, leave a page.

I'm a black writer from Mississippi. That's what I most consider myself.

I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind of what keeps me accountable.

I'm also, than anything else, a teacher and a student. And without the four hours, I'm pretty monsterish. For real.

I'm an obsessive writer who needs and loves revision. Writing helps me learn and helps me teach.

I'm interested in how the confessional is so abrasively critiqued today. I'm not really comfortable with simply confessing but I do think "confessing" is a major part of reckoning.

I'm not good enough as a person and definitely not good enough as a writer.

In essay writing, I'm trying to push the form of expository writing. I'm trying to remember, trying to reckon, trying to find connections with the world, the nation and me, but I'm always trying to push the form, too, without being too obvious that I'm trying to push the form.

I wanted to create a book that was unafraid of black bodies, yet super interested in thinking about the relationship of love to body and sexuality without relying on tired understandings of "gay" "bi" or "straight.

I wish every American explored the importance of novel writing, identity, honesty, character and place in fresh-ass ways.

Long Division has a lot of Afrosurrealist impulses. I think the book was more Afrofuturist when it was like 700 pages.

Not so deep down, we all know that safety is an illusion, that only character melds us together. That’s why most of us do everything we can (healthy and unhealthy) to ward off that real feeling of standing alone so close to the edge of the world.

One of the problems with a lot of "confessional" writing is that it starts and stops with the confessional and doesn't really tie the "I" into a "we" at all. I'm still surprised at how mad critics get at that kind of confessional writing.

The "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others" essay was so hard to write because of the memories, the sensory stuff, but also because it didn't follow the form of any essay that I've ever read. And the truth that I was exploring necessitated that obliteration of traditional form, I think.

After reading Bambara, I wondered for the first time how great an American sentence, paragraph, or book could be if it wasn't, at least partially, written to and for black Americans in the Deep South.

But i am a black man whose black mama's body and spirit were terrorized by another black man's hands and words. Sexism and patriarchy are not part of the revolution. I am a gender-maneuvering gay black man whose spirit was terrorized by other straight black men. Hetero-sexism and heteronormativity are not a part of our revolution. I am a black man who has ignored the plights of so many of my brothers. Separation because of difference and elitism based on class is not a part of the revolution.

I'd never imagined Layla being in one emergency, much less emergencies. Part of it was Layla was a black girl and I was taught by big boys that black girls would be okay no matter what we did to them.

If God needs to condemn anything to hell, it ought to be the idea of social death. Every day we commit an act of revolution, an act of treason, against a system that was never meant to guarantee our survival.

I knew, truth be told, that a present American man would likely teach me how to be a present American man. and I couldn't imagine how those teachings would have made me healthier or more generous.

I swear that white folks need to just shut the hell up sometimes. Y'all make it hard for everybody.

I understood that it is beyond maniacal to harm someone who loved me privately, and then publicly atone for that harm I've done to that person in a publication for cheap male-feminist points and corporate money. While I have been harmed and abused as a kid, I have never had to experience watching someone publicly narratively confess to abusing me because they too were abused for money.

I wanted to write a lie. You wanted to read a lie. I wrote this to you instead.

I will not say I am naked when I am fully clothed. I will not say I am sorry when I am resentful.

Mama's antidote to being born a black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom, but to insist on excellence at all times. Mama takes it personal when she realizes that I realize she is wrong. There ain't no antidote to life, I tell her. How free can you be if you really accept that white folks are the traffic cops of your life? Mama tells me that she is not talking about freedom. She says that she is talking about survival.

Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers have paid more than their fair share, and our nation owes them and their children, and their children's children, a lifetime of healthy choices and second chances. That would be responsible.

Really, we're fighting because she raised me to never forget I was born on parole, which means no black hoodies in wrong neighborhoods, no jogging at night, hands in plain sight at all times in public, no intimate relationships with white women, never driving over the speed limit or doing those rolling stops at stop signs, always speaking the King's English in the presence of white folks, never being outperformed in school or in public by white students, and, most importantly, always remembering that no matter what, the worst of white folks will do anything to get you.

The man of courage is not the man who did not face adversity. The man of courage is the man who faced adversity and spoke to it. The man of courage tells adversity, "You're trespassing and I give you no authority to steal my joy, my faith or my hope.

The nation as it is currently constituted has never dealt with a yesterday or tomorrow where we were radically honest, generous, and tender with each other.

The worst of me wants credit for intending to do right by Jermaine, and has no intentions of disrupting my life for the needs of a cousin I always looked up to.

They are not American super-women, but they are the best of Americans. They have remained responsible, critical, and loving in the face of servitude, sexual assault, segregation, poverty, and psychological violence. They have done this hard, messy work because they were committed to life and justice, and so we all might live more responsibly tomorrow.

We all broken, I said. Some broken folk do whatever they can not to break other folk. If we're gone be broken, I wonder if we can be those kind of broken folk from now on. I think it's possible to be broken and ask for help without breaking other people.

Yet, if I were to adhere to my mom's advice, I would have had to drop out of school years ago (since a lot of folks in our inequitable education system refuse to love us), quit engaging public health offices (because I walked in as a human in need of medical services and walked out as a patient whose subjective world was mad invisible by research lingo: "MSM," otherwise known as "men who have sex with men'), sleep in my bed all damn day (knowing it is more likely that I would be stopped by police when walking to the store in Camden or Bed-Stuy while rocking a fitted cap and carrying books than my white male neighbors would be while walking around in ski masks in the middle of summer and dropping a dime bag on the ground in front of a walking police and his dog)...

Your letter reminds me that any love that necessitates deception is not love. It doesn't matter if that supposed love is institutional or personal.