TONI CADE BAMBARA

The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.

I'll be damned if I want most folks out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves.

I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

It's a dismally lonely business, writing.

And what is religion, you might ask. It's a technology of living.

When you dream, you dialogue with aspects of yourself that normally are not with you in the daytime and you discover that you know a great deal more than you thought you did.

There are times ... when any visitor - in person, by phone, by mail - is an intruder, a burglar, a space hogger, an oxygen taker, a chaos maker, a conflict inducer, a mood chaser, and a total drag.

old folks is the nation.

(M)aybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.

Medication without explanation is obscene.

All writers, musicians, artists, choreographers/dancers, etc., work with the stuff of their experiences. It's the translation of it, the conversion of it, the shaping of it that makes for the drama.

Write a lot and hit the streets. A writer who doesn't keep up with what's out there ain't gonna be out there.

... in a capitalist society a man is expected to be an aggressive, uncompromising, factual, lusty, intelligent provider of goods,and the woman, a retiring, gracious, emotional, intuitive, attractive consumer of goods.

I tend to agree that celibacy for a time is worth considering, for sex is dirty if all it means is winning a man, conquering a woman, beating someone out of something, abusing each other's dignity in order to prove that I am a man, I am a woman.

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.

We have not been scuffling in this waste - howling wilderness for the right to be stupid. All this waste.

The only proper mask to wear in life is your own damn face.

I try to live [the Golden Rule] and I certainly expect it of some particular others. But I'll be damned if I want most folk out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.... We'd better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. Mouth don't win the war.

When we ever invited the beast to dinner he didn't come in and swipe the napkins and start taking notes on the tablecloth 'bout how to take over the whole house?

Our lives preserved. How it was; and how it be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives.

What can defeat greed, technological superiority, and legal lawlessness ... is discipline, consciousness, and unity.