Nuruddin Farah Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
I guess I went into journalism to save the world. I always felt through writing that I wanted to rotate the world slightly.
-
'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.
-
Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.
-
When you're writing a story in bits and pieces, month in and month out, there really isn't time or space for reflection, no room to learn what those scripts had to teach you.
-
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.
-
Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.
-
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.
-
Ottawa is a hot spot of Canadian crime writing, with perhaps the greatest concentration of active, involved, published crime writers anywhere.
-
'Float On' was a fine song, but I was still writing the lyrics on the last day we were working on it and deciding if it was something we wanted to put on the record.
-
Writing is a solitary journey, so I am always excited to go out on book tour and meet readers one-on-one.
-
If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
-
As an actor, we always want people to write about us and talk about us. And when they are actually writing, then we say, 'Don't write about this.' I am an actor; I am a public property. I don't own myself; public owns me.
-
Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career.
-
When you're 19 and writing plays, you think every actor is full of it. They just can't handle your brilliant material.
-
When I began writing in the mid-1960s, I thought it was not important for readers to know whether I was male or female. Also, I was a great admirer of E.B. White, so I may have thought that it would bring me luck to submit my first manuscript as 'E.L.' But if I were starting out today, I would use my first name.
-
I don't think I will ever write about politics or foreign policy. I feel like there is so much good writing in those areas that I have little to add. I also like to steer clear of writing about people whom I do not personally like.
-
In my mind, the plays I was writing were extreme examples of art for art's sake. I didn't necessarily think that other people would love them, though I thought they probably would.
-
I can't imagine what it would be like to write in a relaxed state. I'm going to be writing some stories for my own interest. I want to experiment with different things and see if I can approach writing with much less control and in a better psychological state. It will be like breaking out of a straitjacket.
-
I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
-
You have to stick to what you love, as writing is such a lonely and depressing existence... stick to what you love and someone will hear your voice.
-
When I was writing 'Black Panther,' on one level, I was angry because DC would never let me write 'Batman,' so I was doing Marvel's 'Batman,' and Reverend Achebe became sort of the Joker to Panther's Batman.
-
When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.
-
I am certain that our Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart will increasingly be an international meeting place open to scientists of all countries.
-
Good writing is like a bomb: it explodes in the face of the reader.
