Ishmael Beah Quotes

Like most writers, I write about what has happened to me as that involves the minimum amount of research.

Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.

We've always written from personal experiences.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

In today's time, writing stuff that actually happened is touch-and-go, because you don't want to be too personal. If you are, then it probably won't relate to a mass audience. A lot of times you have to make it sound like it's about everybody else, but you really went through it.

The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.

Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.

Writers do draw inspiration from their own lives, which, quite frankly, might be more interesting than fiction.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

My advice would be to write what is most personal and specific to your experience or your life. And your voice will emerge and because of its specificity, it will be universal.

I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.

After I wrote my memoir, 'A Long Way Gone,' I was a bit exhausted. I didn't want to write another memoir; I felt that it might not be sane for one to speak about himself for many, many, many years in a row. At the same time, I felt the story of 'Radiance of Tomorrow' pulling at me because of the first book.

I don't write autobiographically.

I write about personal experiences.

I don't think I could write about something I've never experienced or felt; all my songs are about things I've been through.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

In a sense, any story that anyone writes is going to be autobiographical - whether it deals directly with the author's experience or not - because it captures what we're obsessed with while working on that particular piece.

'Warm Bodies' ended up becoming one of the most personal relatable things I've written.