Nuruddin Farah Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I guess I went into journalism to save the world. I always felt through writing that I wanted to rotate the world slightly.
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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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Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.
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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.
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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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Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.
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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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'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.
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Writing is a solitary journey, so I am always excited to go out on book tour and meet readers one-on-one.
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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.
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Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career.
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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.
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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.
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I tend to push whatever is looking over my shoulder away when I am writing. It's once the box of books arrive that I say I'm going to be pilloried for this or that. But then you realize it's done, and there is nothing I can do. I'm proud of the book.
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And I love writing. I've always loved writing.
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My mom's a concert pianist, so she started teaching me when I was around seven. When I was eight, I started writing my own songs, and kinda started putting piano and singing together. But I'm trained classically, which is a big influence on me, I think.
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It sounds like I'm joking when I say it, but when I wrote 'Take Me To Church' and a lot of these things, I didn't think they would be hits. I thought I was writing for a potentially smaller audience.
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I love writing songs, but I don't want to write the songs everyone else is asking me to write.
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My existence is about making movies, so I've just got to rock and roll with the punches. You want to make movies on telephones, I'm there.
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Having a Christian worldview shapes my decision-making with respect to all aspects of my life. I always respect people in public life who are principled, and those principles have to be connected to something. And my faith is what serves as the anchor and directs my actions.
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I don't think Will does get upstaged because his reaction is always funnier than what is actually happening. That is also the reason Tommy is funnier than Will.
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Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish.
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I'd like to look like Madonna when I'm her age. I also look at athletes and love their bodies. I've always wanted to be muscly, not skinny. A lot of women yo-yo around, but I'm always aware if I'm getting a bit out of shape. I never look at the scales but I can just tell. It goes on my tum and bum.
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Good writing is like a bomb: it explodes in the face of the reader.
