Writing Quotes
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In the early '90s, when I really started to find my voice, I was reading a lot of books, and I was moved by the writers, like Chinua Achebe, and I wanted to be able to write rhymes that were as potent as what I was reading.
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Oswald Chambers writes, ‘Never make a principle out of your experience; let God be as original with other people as He is with you.’ To that I would add, ‘Be careful not to turn others’ lives into the mold for your own.’ Allow God to be as creative with you as He is with each of us.
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I was first introduced to Kafka's writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka's fiction felt hyperrealistic.
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And the reason I am so nervous is that everything I do now is leading me to one of three possible futures... Which one will it be? Time alone will tell. But still I know that writing this diary can perhaps provide the answer; it may even help produce the right future.
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Oh you know, I've been writing a novel.
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When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.
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I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me. Have you found work yet? she asked. Or are you still just writing?
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I suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.
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Eventually, I realised that I wanted to try to create something myself, and that's what writing novels is. Not because I wanted to put myself in front of the world, but because I wanted to create something that would go out into the world.
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I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.
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It's not a morbid thing, but I think I've never been afraid of death, which is maybe why I love writing about it.
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Obviously loss of family is huge and critical, but I think really it's more about losing a sense of family. The horror of that kind of incompleteness. Writing this book, I tried not to think about my father, which does no one any good fictionally. I did try to imagine not just the horror of that moment, but the horror of having witnessed it, and the lifelong void. And I think that's what's so frightening.
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The place I write best is at the Angell Hall computer center on the University of Michigan campus, where I went to school. I still go over there and rock it through the night.
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When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.
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When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
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Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I'll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know, I've written a whole song in an hour.
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Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
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I like writing songs all females can relate to - songs about when you're a chick and you get your heart broken and you go shopping.
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People who work in factories or in the woods or maybe a dairy farm - for years, I've been fascinated with people like that. No pretensions. They just live their lives. I found them beautiful. They were all I seemed to be interested in writing about.
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The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.
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I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.
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All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.
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You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.
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I'm a bit skeptical about the possibilities for resistant fiction, and even more despondent over the potential for politically engaged writing to do much of anything outside the dominant means of production and distribution.
