Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Life ain't the movies.
I have a terrible memory.
I claimed myself and remade my life.
I can't write what I don't believe in.
... survival is the least of my desires.
Why write stories? To join the conversation.
fiction is the great lie that tells the truth
Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.
Watch out, or I'm liable to put you in a story.
Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me.
Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.
Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.
It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.
I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)
I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement.
It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.
Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.
Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.
What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.
stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.
I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.
When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.
And while it is true that I got the best woman in the world, I don't think love saves you.
One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.
I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.
I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.
Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.
Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure
I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way.
Behind the story I tell is the one I don't...Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.
Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.
That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.
If you write a book that's as powerful and successful as 'Bastard,' there's a strong desire to prove there's something else.
she got a reputation for an easy smile and a sharp tongue, and using one to balance the other, she seemed friendly but distant
People don't do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do right because the world doesn't make sense if you don't.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.
The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of belief we create from nothing.
Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.
The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.
Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.
Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.
my life has been saved over and over again by picking up a book in which someone captured the whole experience of being despised and not dying.
I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.
He never said "Don't tell your mama." He never had to say it. I did not know how to tell anyone what I felt, what scared me and shamed me... (109)