Edwidge Danticat Quotes

When I first started writing the album, "Cry Baby" was a song that I really wanted to write because it represented all of these personal insecurities that I had for a long time.

Hmmm. I think a lot of people can write poems that are howls of anguish. I think I've probably written such things and then torn them up.

Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

Books arent written on whim or promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writings a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.

If I can get it down on paper without puking all over the word processor, then as far as I'm concerned, it's fit to see the light of day.

I don't worry about being exposed. When I'm writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don't write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary.

When I say what I'm reading, this is what I need. I know the ills that plague me.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

One word after another. That's the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it's the only way to do it. So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.

To live is to war with trolls in heart and woul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

It's not just lies they're referring to. It's life. You can't run to another town, another place, another state. Whatever it is you're running from-it goes with you. It stays with you until you find out how to confront it.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

I became a writer, a teller of tales, because otherwise I would have died... or worse.

Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

My most recent novel didn't start out scaring me, but as I got deeper into writing it, it scared me. It's not so much where the story's going. It's where it came from. I always come out of it thinking, Okay, that got it all outta me. The next one's gonna be nice and simple, and it's not gonna scare me, and that never seems to happen.

I carry around a little journal with me, a little notebook and a pen and just write all the time. Not necessarily actually sitting down and writing lyrics, just free-form writing, whatever's going on in my mind.