Scott Saul > Quotes

“the less people knew, the louder they got.”
― Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor

“Outside of Yale and its American Studies department, I owe a great debt to Sumanth Gopinath and Peter Curtis, who lent me their subtle understanding of music theory and their finely tuned ears and who encouraged my blustery incursions into the domain of musicology;”
― Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties

“I was scared,” he observed. Unlike his soft-edged mother, Buck and Marie were extraordinarily gifted at instilling fear; their livelihoods depended upon it.”
― Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor

“There was nothing in Richard’s act that compared with the defiance of Dick Gregory, recounting from a jail cell his tussle with a southern cop: “He said, ‘You’ll make this march over my dead body.’ I said, ‘Baby, that wouldn’t be a bad route.”
― Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor

“Scratch any musician," jazz scholar John Szwed has said, "and you find a crypto-Pythagorean.”
― Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties

“When he riffs on sexual taboos—how a fringe benefit of “being a Negro” was “fucking white girls,” how he tried to keep his sex with gay queens on the down low—he is met with murmurs, side talk. “This ain’t as funny as we thought it would be,” he observes.”
― Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor

“would you still love me if I wasn’t who I appear to be?”
― Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor

“On the urgent side: it showed the black audience at the Coliseum sitting listlessly through “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as if trapped watching an endless commercial, then purposefully standing up and pumping their fists for the chant of “It’s Nation Time” (the nation in question being the black nation).”
― Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor

“reminded, by a deputy, that he had been booked with thousands of dollars on his person, more than enough to post bail. He bought his way out of jail time.”
― Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor

“A cow always knows where the weak fence is.”
― Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor

“(“Uncle Sam wants you . . . dead, nigger”).”
― Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor

“Asked if he dreaded the possibility of segregationist George Wallace becoming president, Richard shrugged and said, “Wallace is president. Wallace has always been president.”
― Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor