Writing Quotes - Page 6

The conqueror writes history, they came, they conquered and they write. You don't expect the people who came to invade us to tell the truth about us.

Whatever's happening today, remember it is only ONE SCENE in a long movie. Don't treat it like it's the whole story. Keep writing the story.

make it a practice to avoid hating anyone. If someone's been guilty of despicable actions, especially toward me, I try to forget him. I used to follow a practice - somewhat contrived, I admit - to write the man's name on a piece of scrap paper, drop it into the lowest drawer of my desk, and say to myself: "That finishes the incident, and so far as I'm concerned, that fellow." The drawer became over the years a sort of private wastebasket for crumbled-up spite and discarded personalities.

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies - for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text - as into the world and into history - by her own movement.

Unfortunately I've been to jail a couple times. Anytime I come in it's difficult to make music, write songs.

I think segregation is bad, I think it's wrong, it's immoral. I'd fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don't need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that.

I write to find out what I am thinking. I write to find out who I am. I write to understand things.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.

To choose to write is to reject silence.

You only pass through this life once, you don't come back for an encore.

You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart--your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born.

If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.

I be off the slave ships, building pyramids, writing my own hieroglyphs

I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

You cannot help another who will not help him or herself. In the end, all souls must walk their path - and the reason they are walking a particular path may not be clear to us... or even to them at the level of ordinary human consciousness. Do what you can to help others, of course. Show love and caring whenever and wherever you can. But do not get caught up in someone else's "story" to the point where you start writing it.

Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

He who stops being better stops being good.

...I write to keep in contact with our ancestors and to spread truth to people.

I write only for my shadow which is cast on the wall in front of the light. I must introduce myself to it.

I definitely fall in love quickly, and I'm very in love with being in love. But it is hard for me to write about love.

Africans and persons of African descent must assume the primary responsibility and leadership in historical research....if we are to continue to leave practically all important historical research and writing concerning the black race to the white man, then we must be prepared to accept, uncomplainingly, the white man's point of view.

To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.