Ama Ata Aidoo Quotes

Sometimes things just fall out of your head on the paper, and if you're smart, you learn not to touch them.

All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

If I'm walking along the street, ideas come. Ideas about things that I'm interested in. I've jotted them down in the past on bits of paper and then, more recently, on apps in my phone. I've always written poetry since I was a kid.

I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

Writing is the basis of all, because creating something that didn't even exist before is like taking an empty canvass. It is a wonderful thing to make something out of nothing. You've got an empty page, you've got an idea, and then you start typing and that is the most thrilling thing of all. And then if it becomes a movie or something else that's a plus, but the original writing of it is what's very exciting.

Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.

You see, writing down your meanderings gets something started deep in the recesses of your brain. That distant part of your mind knows that you want to write stories or poems or plays and not endless jabber, and it will get to work. It may take a while. You may have to write this stuff for hours or days or weeks, but eventually that subterranean part of your brain will come through and begin to send you ideas.

I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset it would be charming.

At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it-it will haunt you till it's written.

I think that once you start writing songs, you start developing a library of ideas that you can go and take from, so it gets easier as you go.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.

Anything that I write comes from the soul.

I have 40 years of unpublished material, the ones they don't pick, and the reason I don't redraw them or use them again is that I like to use my brain every day and come up with new jokes.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.