Nikki Grimes Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
I had a financial page to write in the Mail on Sunday where I'd give tips on shares. I worked there for two and a half years. Nothing compares to the burst of energy felt on a newsroom floor when a big story breaks.
-
Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.
-
But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been.
-
We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
-
Everything I make starts very personally.
-
When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.
-
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.
-
Sometimes the characters develop almost without your knowing it. You find them doing things you hadn't planned on, and then I have to go back to page 42 and fix things. I'm not recommending it as a way to write. It's very sloppy, but it works for me.
-
Computers make me totally blank out.
-
I travel a lot, and I hunt for fabrics, then I have the tailor make me something.
-
I love to take something ordinary and make it really special.
-
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.
-
Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.
-
You cannot make an aircraft without forged components.
-
To me, a staircase looks like a series of dark and light horizontal stripes, which is exactly how you'd draw a staircase. So I know how the image is going to look on the page.
-
Sometimes I have problems where I get into a mode where even just looking at a page on a screen makes me panic. And getting past that is a really intense thing to do.
-
I grew up on a lot of early Beatles, DC5, Cream, Clapton, Page, Beck and Hendrix.
-
Public decision-making does not lend itself to certitude.
-
To innovate is not to reform.
-
Do your art. But don't wreck your art if it doesn't lend itself to paying the bills. That would be a tragedy.
-
So what we can answer as geneticists is questions about biology, about biological ancestry. But to make any sense of that historically we have to contextualize it - the archaeology, the linguistic pattern, even the climatology.
-
I love to dance. I can dance for, like, four or five hours nonstop without even drinking water. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
-
There's something about a blank page that makes me tingle.
