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Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
Maya Angelou -
I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.
Maya Angelou
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How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
Maya Angelou -
The only thing is, people have to develop courage. It is most important of all the virtues. Because without courage, you can't practice any other virtues consistently.
Maya Angelou -
Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.
Maya Angelou -
I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.
Maya Angelou -
In a magazine, one can get - from cover to cover - 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.
Maya Angelou -
Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
Maya Angelou
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I love a Hebrew National hot dog with an ice-cold Corona - no lime. If the phone rings, I won't answer until I'm done.
Maya Angelou -
Yes. When I’m writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we’re capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness.
Maya Angelou -
I love the melodies in the Old Testament, how preachers highlight them when they read from the Scripture. But I was influenced forever by the New Testament. I love the Beatitudes, informing us that the meek shall inherit the earth.
Maya Angelou -
While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man's humanity to man.
Maya Angelou -
I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
Maya Angelou -
Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.
Maya Angelou
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I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
Maya Angelou -
Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.
Maya Angelou -
Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?
Maya Angelou -
Whenever I want to laugh, I read a wonderful book, 'Children's Letters to God.' You can open it anywhere. One I read recently said, 'Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.'
Maya Angelou -
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.
Maya Angelou -
I do like to have guns around. I don't like to carry them. But I like - if somebody is going to come into my house and I have not put out the welcome mat, I want to stop them.
Maya Angelou
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Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It's very clear.
Maya Angelou -
I think music is one of the hero/sheroes of the African-American existence.
Maya Angelou -
Growing up, my grandmother did not want worldly music in the house. Then when I went out to California, I started listening to Spanish music, mostly Mexican music. But were I in Egypt, I would listen to the music of the people, or if I was in Italy, I'd listen to Italian music.
Maya Angelou -
I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.
Maya Angelou