John A. Williams Quotes

,It must be pretty awful for a white man to learn that one of the things wrong with this society is that it is not based on dollars directly or alone, but dollars denied men who are black so dollars can go into the pockets of men who are white. It must make white men ponder a kind of weakness that will make them deny work to black men so that work can be done by men who are white.

The worst kind of tyrant was the one who once had been the victim.

,Bloodlust is like a natural disaster; it has to run its course. I have seen their faces; they are faces out of nightmares—most ordinary—so ordinary that you can’t believe the brains behind them capable of genocide.

Novelists would do well to remember that when the works of the scholar-historians create doubt in the researcher’s mind, the researcher then turns to literature as a primary source for confirmation or correction. If the truth of a time, a people, a state is not available anywhere else, let it be in the novel. - from Twayne’s US Authors Series: JOHN A WILLIAMS by Gilbert Muller