Jesmyn Ward Quotes
After I finished my first draft of 'Salvage the Bones,' I felt that I wasn't political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about.
Quotes to Explore
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'Yellow Moon' was a poem. My wife at the time, Joel - she's dead now - it was our 25th anniversary. She had the chance to go on a cruise with her sister. And I'm home with the kids and looking up, and I saw the big moon, and I just started writing.
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All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.
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Writing a tribe is fun. They have their own language, their own slang; they repeat it, and it becomes part of the texture of the play. For a writer, that's thrilling. That's when my pen flies.
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Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.
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I live in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, so I just like to wander around. Williamsburg's such a cool little neighborhood community spot.
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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
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When students leave college, they are like children who know nothing about the problems of life, and don't have a political stance.
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I firmly believe, only because I've been doing this for so long, every show takes three years. 90% of them don't get three years. It just does. It takes a long time to build a community, build a friendship with your characters. It's hard for people to grasp on and make them care about you.
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It's not the job of the U.S. military to do nation-building or produce democratic utopias.
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We live in a culture that's been hijacked by the management consultant ethos. We want everything boiled down to a Power Point slide. We want metrics and 'show me the numbers.' That runs counter to the immensely complex nature of so many social, economic and political problems. You cannot devise an algorithm to fix them.
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I strongly believe in political activity that has to do with choices - and not consensus that sometimes covers problems and doesn't resolve them.
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The path of progress cuts through the four-way intersection of the moral, medical, religious and political - and whichever way you turn, you are likely to run over someone's deeply held beliefs.
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The gift I have to give to my fellow countrymen and people around the world, the facts are the Muslim community are our gift. They are the fabric of what makes America great.
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As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.
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The morning is always my best time of the day for writing because that's when my head is best.
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Whatever's going on with me at the time of writing is going to find its way into the piece. If that doesn't happen, then what the hell am I doing? So if I'm writing 'Inglourious Basterds,' and I'm in love with a girl and we break up, that's going to find its way into the piece.
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My favorite 'Mister Rogers' episodes were always the ones where Mr. Rogers would go into the community.
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Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
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You have to keep your audience in your mind; if you're writing stuff that you know nobody's going to care about then you should rethink what you're doing!
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I think that being a parent has expanded my writing, expanded my understanding of my characters, and has added a depth and richness to my work. Having kids deepened my idea of parenting and all the anxieties that come along with it.
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Ants are good citizens; they place group interest first. But they carry it so far, they have few or no political rights. An ant doesn't have the vote, apparently; he just has his duties.
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I was taught to value hard work. At the end of day, I'm just Olivia.
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I learned about poise and dignity, and I learned about what it means to be an African-American in television and what that requires in terms of what kind of position you take for yourself and how you define your own reality in a world that is still finding its footing, to say the least.
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After I finished my first draft of 'Salvage the Bones,' I felt that I wasn't political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about.
