Maya Angelou Quotes

Generally, my writing is influenced by living, by absorbing everything that happens to me and my actions.

As I experience life and go through things, that's what I write about.

The story of 'Lasers' is my story. I didn't have to look too far to get subject matter for this record; it was stuff that was happening to me.

Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me.

I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a picture book, a speech or anything, really, it has so much to do with what I'm going through personally or a problem I'm trying to work out. When I wrote my novel 'Baby,' my three children had all just gone out the door.

Whatever I'm writing comes organically out of my life.

I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.

I get inspiration from my everyday life.

For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about.

The only real inspiration or muse that I have is just the life that I live.

My natural bend is to get attracted towards things that have been an influence in my life.

I take inspiration from my own experiences and from other people's experiences.

What I went through in personal life had a big impression on my professional choices.

In order to get new things to rap about, you've gotta live.

You live through stuff, and it affects the way you feel about the world, and you write about it.

The life that I live and the experiences that I have always affect what comes out of me creatively. I think that's what makes music real.

All of my stories, they don't come from my high school experience, but they're definitely based on things that happened to me in high school, or things that happened to friends of mine, or things that I wish had happened to me.

Just trying to live our lives and figuring out how to turn that into art. It's tough to say that the art was premeditated. Instead you just focused on living. 'How do I want to live? What do I want to do?' Then you figured out how to make that into art.

I'm inspired by whatever I see, feel, hear about, watch on the TV...anything. It can be something that I really need to get off my chest so I write or something a friend is going through which gets my thoughts going.

You can't be a writer and have nothing to write about. You have to have life experiences.

Everything in life is writable.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.

I remember that when I got to NYU, everyone was writing scripts. But I was 18 at the time, and when you write a script, so much of it is about what you pull from life, and this sounds sort of cheesy, but I felt like I didn't have enough life experience at that point to write a movie.