Quotes on Writing

Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

I hope there is something worthy in my writings and not merely the novelty of a black face associated with the power to rhyme that has attracted attention.

I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.

So long as readers keep reading and my publishers keep publishing, I plan to keep on writing. I'd have to be an idiot to be burnt-out in this job.

Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year.

For most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve. Among the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to?

It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do.

Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.

I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world, and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.

As a young writer, I was on guard against the Latina in me, the Spanish in me because as far as I could see the models that were presented to me did not include my world. In fact, 'I was told by one teacher in college that one could only write poetry in the language in which one first said Mother. That left me out of American literature, for sure.

I find it relatively easy to keep my clothes on because I don't really feel like taking them off. It's not an urge I have. For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is. That's putting myself out there, maybe even more than taking my shirt off.

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning

Failures are inevitable. Unfortunately, in film they live for ever and they're 40 ft wide and 20 ft high.

Writing is not an exercise in excision, it's a journey into sound.

It wasn't until I hung out with Dead Prez and understood how to make, you know, raps with a message sound cool that I was able to just write "All Falls Down" in 15 minutes.

Purists behave as if there was a vintage year when language achieved a measure of excellence which we should all strive to maintain. In fact, there was never such a year. The language of Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time was no better and no worse than that of our own - just different.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

Your name is upon my tongue your image is in my sight your memory is in my heart where can I send these words that I write ?