Paul Mooney Quotes

When you know who you are, it’s harder for people to fuck with you.

I know white folks, they can't take it. Because all of their lives, white people have been told they're the shit. White people always told you 'You're the best, you're everything, you're wonderful, you come from heaven, you're eve-ry-thing, you've never done nothing to nobody, you wear the white hat, you're the good fucking guy,' and the minute they hear [a] a nigga talking about [race] it freaks em.

It's one of the many reasons that I go to sleep and wake up with thoughts of authorship. Who writes our stories? Who chronicles our tales of cooking it, playing it, writing it? Baldwin, Gordon, the Apollo, Jacob Lawrence, Paul Mooney, James Brown, Malcolm - that's my neighborhood. Why wouldn't I want to cook for the people who lived there?

When I imitate middle-class white speech, I see a flicker of unease cross the faces of the white people in the audience. Then, when I go into ghetto riff, the smiles return. They’re fine as long as I am making fun of the same kind of people they make fun of, chinks and spics and niggers. But as soon as I start talking about them, I can clear a room.

Whoever dismisses bigotry or underestimates its impact has never lived under the pain.

I don’t fatten frogs to feed snakes. Are you stupid? I taught you better than that. A wet pussy and a dry purse don’t match.

When you know who you are, it’s harder for people to fuck with you. Hollywood is dangerous because the great hobby they have in that town is fucking with other people. Building you up, knocking you down, until finally you are destroyed. They all want to create you and mold you.

Few traces of New York as America’s capital remain. If Hamilton were roaming the streets of Lower Manhattan today, he’d find just three buildings he recognized: St. Paul’s Chapel, and two homes—the Edward Mooney house (ca. 1785) on the Bowery, and the James Watson house (ca. 1792) on State Street.

What Richard wants is what I want, what everyone in the world wants. To be accepted, to be loved for who we are, not for some playacting phony version of ourselves.