R.K. King Quotes

I’ve been to the Mountaintop

I think the inconveniences of a segregated education are much greater than the inconveniences of busing students so that they can get an integrated quality education.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

You couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar.

If it's ka it'll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone

Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.

People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.

never's the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.

The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

And people who don’t dream, who don’t have any kind of imaginative life, they must… they must go nuts. I can’t imagine that.

There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

Swear to me swear to me that if it isn't dead you'll all come back.

They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?

They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn't like to look at them. They were the walking dead.

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.

Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.

I tend to scare myself.

It is the tale, not he who tells it.

Black as night and as beautiful as forever.

Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.

Like anybody, I would like to have a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will.

We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based.

The past is obdurate.

She ran out of her marriage the way a woman can run out of a pair of sandals when she decides to let go and really dash.

Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.

We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.

He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.

I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.

Primarily I'm a meat man, although once in a while I toy with a few vegetables.

And humor has always been a weapon. You want to get even on somebody? You want to attack somebody? Make fun of them.

There's a charm, there's a rhythm, there's a soul to Jewish humor. When I first saw Richard Pryor perform, I told him, 'You're doing a Jewish act.'

Men. You can't live with them, you can't... no. That's about it.

That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.

Yeah. I've been pretty fortunate to travel I guess, all around the place.

you know, a daydream properly utilized can be the most powerful force in the universe. One need only dream of freedom to begin to break the spell of enslavement.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.

You have this resonant box that sounds cool when you smack it, so why not go for it?

Artistic talent is far more common than the talent to nurture artistic talent.

Sooner or later everything you thought you'd left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again.

Music was my first love and companion.

If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work.

Be nice to people whether you mean it or not. You never know when a kind word can make a difference in another person’s day – or maybe even his or her life.

If you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were.