Tananarive Due Quotes
I've been a novelist since 1995 and have had novels in and out of option, and watching that process just made me realize that I have to live by what I teach my students, because I teach screenwriting at Spellman.
Quotes to Explore
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If people want to really know what's up with me then they can read one of my interviews.
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I'm not faithful to one particular medium, and it's what I try to teach to people who work with me.
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I said, to be a New Yorker you have to live here for six months, and if at the end of the six months you find you walk faster, talk faster, think faster, you're a New Yorker.
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I might see something on TV and get inspired to write about it. I can't sit down and plan to write. It has to come to me in my head like someone telling me the words.
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Nobody has approached me about an offer to work in India. However, I can categorically state that if they did so, I would refuse immediately.
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If you were to ask me what I want to do – I don't want to be a celebrity, I want to make a difference.
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I really don't have anything urgent to say, and I think you shouldn't write unless you have something urgent to say. Sometimes that troubles me, and sometimes I don't really care.
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Everyone's clamoring for the fourth book in the 'Fifty Shades' trilogy, which makes me laugh. Just the part of 'a fourth book in trilogy' that makes me laugh, not the clamoring for the next book.
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Gospel music always relaxes me and calms my nerves.
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A ton of kids at school have made fun of me; if I had to give advice to other girls, I would say, 'Hang loose and ignore them. They shouldn't faze you no matter how popular they think they are.'
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I was in New York doing musicals in the theater and on Broadway before 'Orange,' so people always ask, 'Are you ever going to get to sing? Does she even sing?' But people who know me know I actually do sing.
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I live in Canada in the summer and some time in the fall.
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My research for 'Adam' affected me profoundly, particularly the research into evil's underbelly. We tend not to think about evil until it pokes its head out of the air about us and then it tends to scare us silly. As well it should.
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I'm not the best singer in the world, but the albums have always been personal. They're stories about me and what I'm going through.
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I don't do method acting. If I play a farmer, I'm not gonna spend 3 weeks on a chicken farm. That's a bit too much for me.
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I don't care what you say about me. Just be sure to spell my name wrong.
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For the mind is all the easier to teach before it is set.
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The state of New Jersey is really two places - terrible cities and wonderful suburbs. I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves. It's very romantic in that way, but a bit naive. I like to play with that in my work.
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Bergman movies were the most influential. They used to show at Goucher University, which was where my parents used to live. 'Brink of Life' was the first one I ever saw. Three pregnant women in a maternity ward and their misery - I love that. That is what I want to show at my funeral.
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With Ibrahim al-Koni, what I figured out was - and you'll see this in his novels - if your time is limited, make the unit of the chapters small so that you can finish one a day, at least in the first draft. Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft. I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.
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It doesn't require much thought for one to realise that any travel book worthy of the name has to be a departure from the standard idea of the form.
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From now on, I don't care if my tea leaves spell 'Die, Ron, Die,' I'm chucking them in the bin where they belong.
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I read contrived memoirs by presidential candidates. For every 'Dreams From My Father' - Barack Obama's honest, literary portrayal of his biracial upbringing - there were a dozen cautious, formulaic vanity projects by politicians.
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I've been a novelist since 1995 and have had novels in and out of option, and watching that process just made me realize that I have to live by what I teach my students, because I teach screenwriting at Spellman.
