So much of my work has been about disappearing.

Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example, writers of slave narratives tend to lose their individual voices, as they were expected to stand in for all other voices, which were absent.

One of the interesting things about quoting in an artwork is that there is a repeated confusion about who is speaking - one essentially becomes the author of a quote one uses.

Glenn Ligon Quotes