Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. (Nikki Giovanni) Quotes
I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
Quotes to Explore
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I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.
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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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I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.
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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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Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.
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All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.
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I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.
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There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I'm not so interested in the divisions. I'm interested in the way things cross over.
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I can be collaborative, for instance, in situations where I go and study the artist's work before I start writing. Then I can at least try to write towards their style.
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I'm basically a know-it-all, and I'm writing a book about it. I want it to be called 'Danson on Water' and have me on the cover in this Christlike pose, standing on the water.
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I know from an editor's point of view or a publisher's point of view it's easier to slot me into a particular niche. But I know that I'd be bored unless I wrote a book that in some senses was a challenge.
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I'm a stand-up comic. I'm always doing dates; it's just that, if I'm working on a project or I'm busy, I can't get out on the road or book any shows. Since the beginning of my career, I'm usually out for at least 10-15 dates throughout the year. If I have time, then I try to get at least 30-40 dates.
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I don't read horror, ever. When I was 15, I made the mistake of reading part of 'The Exorcist.' It was the first and last horror book I've ever opened.
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I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book.
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When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.
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It's easier to release an ebook than a print book.
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I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
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Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
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I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.
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And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.
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Then began an experience that turned my life around-working on a book with a black kid as hero. None of the manuscripts I'd been illustrating featured any black kids-except for token blacks in the background. My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along. Years before I had cut from a magazine a strip of photos of a little black boy. I often put them on my studio walls before I'd begun to illustrate children's books. I just loved looking at him. This was the child who would be the hero of my book.
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I could open up a little gym, and I would be blissfully happy.
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The master of your body did not run off and leave you masterless.
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I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
