Colson Whitehead Quotes

Quotes to Explore

• I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.

  

  Ed Westwick
  • Work
  • Writing
  • Poetry

• You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.

  

  Warren Beatty
  • Work
  • Success
  • Know

• '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.

  

  Aaron Neville
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Home

• I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historical fiction.

  

  Candace Camp
  • Writing
  • History
  • Education

• Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

  

  E. L. Doctorow
  • Writing
  • Learn
  • Start

• I like the performing. And interviews, even. And the stuff that's not sitting in a room by yourself with empty paper. But I never loved writing, to tell you the truth.

  

  Randy Newman
  • Writing
  • Truth
  • Yourself

• We're more interested in someone writing a really great answer that's going to be read by thousands or tens of thousands of people over the next few years as it stays on Quora and as it gets distributed on the Internet.

  

  Adam D'Angelo
  • People
  • Great
  • Writing

• I like writing about biology, not doing it.

  

  Kary Mullis
  • Writing
  • Doing
  • Biology

• I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

  

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • People
  • Writing
  • Political

• 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.

  

  Warren Ellis
  • Work
  • Writing
  • Style

• I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'

  

  Patricia MacLachlan
  • Writing
  • Experience
  • Book

• The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

  

  Walter Savage Landor
  • Writing
  • Wise
  • Riches

• I love writing. Given a choice, after directing for all these years, and if given an army of talented directors, I would not direct at all.

  

  Vikram Rohit Shetty
  • Writing
  • Love
  • Army

• Personal relationships are usually my biggest inspirations for writing my songs. The best way for me to write a song is to visualise the story in my head, and I start humming a melody, and before you know it, a song is born.

  

  Nadia Ali
  • Writing
  • Song
  • Best

• I like collaboration because, first of all, I'm good at writing lyrics. I don't know how to make beats. I don't play instruments. I'm not a good singer. So even when you see a solo album of mine, it's still a collaboration.

  

  Talib Kweli Black Star
  • Good
  • Writing
  • Lyrics

• I'm quite adept at writing two or sometimes even three stories at once. So if I get stuck on one story, I switch the next and let my subconscious work on unraveling any plot problems from another story.

  

  Zara Cox
  • Work
  • Writing
  • Problems

• You could take away the singing, and I am fine. But don't take away my gift of writing. It is the best way I can relate and express what I am feeling and what I am going through.

  

  BeBe Winans
  • Writing
  • Feeling
  • Singing

• 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.

  

  J. M. Coetzee
  • Writing
  • Mind
  • Heart

• For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail.

  

  Paul Auster
  • Thinking
  • Writing
  • House

• Kids can't build a marble statue at home. But I've had parents tell me that, after an exhibit, their kids immediately dug out their Lego kits and disappeared for three days.

  

  Nathan Sawaya
  • Home
  • Kids
  • Parents

• Joseph Warren, like a lot of revolutionary leaders, was into Enlightenment literature.

  

  Nathaniel Philbrick
  • Literature
  • Enlightenment

• Gay actors have been playing straight since Euripides.

  

  Bryan Batt
  • Gay

• Even if I don't reach all my goals, I've gone higher than I would have if I hadn't set any.

  

  Danielle Fotopoulos
  • Would
  • Reach
  • Higher

• If you're writing a detective novel or horror or sci-fi, you want to expand or reinvigorate the genre in your own little way.

  Colson Whitehead
  • Writing