Marilyn Nelson Quotes
Writing in form is a way of developing your thinking - your thinking along with the tradition. In a way, it's not you alone, it's you in partnership.
Quotes to Explore
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If you are a girl dressing up in the morning thinking about the whole world having a point of view on what you are wearing, it takes the pleasure out of getting dressed.
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Many scientists have been drawn to Buddhism out of a sense that the Western tradition has delivered an impoverished conception of basic, human sanity. In the West, if you speak to yourself out loud all day long, you are considered crazy. But speaking to yourself silently - thinking incessantly - is considered perfectly normal.
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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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The connection I make with being young and growing up is, like, the feeling of not being crushed by the world. Having an idea, thinking you can do it.
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It's amazing living alone. I'm very lucky. It's like a refuge.
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When your co-stars are 9-month-old babies, you fall in love. You start thinking, When am I going to have my own?
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With sitcom writing, you're trying to write stories.
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We are increasingly open to understanding how we are all connected and that if we sink the ship that we are all on, we all drown. However, we have simultaneously become so focused on our own life experiences that we think we are alone.
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I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey.
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Songwriter friends will be like, 'Oh my God, when are you going to put out 'Love Triangle?'' It's just been that song for me that really helped me get a lot of writing sessions and helped jump-start my writing career.
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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.
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The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.
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I actually run a non-profit where one of the main objectives is to branch out and get a new audience for the theater. Just because the writing is so good and nothing is more effective than seeing something live and happening right in front of your face, so I definitely want to continue to pursue that.
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People say, 'How does having kids change your writing? Do you see the world through their eyes?' No - you just become a faster songwriter... In the old days, you'd be like, 'Oh I'm gonna work on this song for a few days.'
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The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.
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I was always more interested in my books and my writing than going out. It's OK to say I'm a nerd. That's me.
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You need people around you that care about you and are thinking about you in your best interest. And keep your mind straight.
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As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.
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When you look at statistics for the white community alone, you see that we've become two separate worlds in which the successful are educated and wait to have children until they are married, and those in poverty are primarily those without higher education and with children outside of marriage.
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In athletics there's always been a willingness to cheat if it looks like you're not cheating. I think that's just a quirk of human nature.
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I can imagine an utter hatred for the jazz avant-garde.
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People in the Middle East may consider the U.S. an evil hegemony that has tainted their culture, but when I look at the growth of racial and ethnic tolerance and understanding in my generation in the U.S., and see those sentiments make it around the world, it makes me feel proud.
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The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.
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Writing in form is a way of developing your thinking - your thinking along with the tradition. In a way, it's not you alone, it's you in partnership.
