Marjorie Liu Quotes

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

I have been writing my heart out all my life, but only getting a living out of it now.... ... it's not a question of the merit of art, but a question of spontaneity and sincerity and joy I say. I would like everybody in the world to tell his full life confession and tell it his own way and then we'd have something to read in our old age.

I've always been super expressive, and I've always liked to express myself any way I can.

The courage to be yourself is the essence of hip hop

In the deepest hour of the night I confess to myself three things; I would die if I was forbidden to write, forbidden to love, or forbidden to fashion....love each other, and celebrate the art and lifestyle of music.

When you write from your gut and let the stuff stay flawed and don't let anybody tell you to make it better, it can end up looking like nothing else.

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.

Even if it's such a lowly art as TV, you've got to get stuff off your chest, because that's what makes something different and original, your particular take on stuff.

If you worry about how good the art is, you're never going to make your own art.

Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.

Follow your heart, and your pleasure in art. Don’t do what you think is going to be making you money, or what you’re parents want you to do, or what that beautiful girl or guy thinks you should be doing. Do what you love. It’s going to lead to where you want to go. Go out there and make the world more beautiful. I know you can.

You've got to be in a place where you can put your guard down. I've got a long list of things I consider to be selling out. But amongst that list, one of them is when you make art without putting your guard down.

Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do.

I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.

Writing is the one art form that really should allow you to hang yourself.

I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.

Don't be pretentious is my first advice to young writers. This is the big problem - just because you're getting an MFA doesn't mean you have to write for the Academy. Be true to your personality. Don't temper your personality down with words. Don't build defensive fortresses around yourself with words - words are your friends.

There’s a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

The key thing is, don't worry about if anyone is reading you or not. Figure out your voice and figure out what you want to write about, what you're good at, what you like doing.

The nice thing about being on stage is it's not that I know what to do, but I have a very clear feeling that anything I do is OK. All I'm up there to do is express how I feel. Any way I choose to do that is fine.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

When you freely express, you are the total style.

Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives

It's exciting to watch people do and write and say what they feel like doing, writing and saying.