Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I wanted to be my own heroine.
I need the lightness of children's lit.
Great trouble breeds great art, I think.
Without the library, I would have been lost.
I knew it would be painful to write a memoir.
I'm always curious about other writers' routines.
If I can get a page out in a day, I am celebrating.
A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.
I didn't start really focusing on writing until I was 24.
I live in the South; there are Confederate flags everywhere.
People don't read me and say, 'Oh, it's so clean and elegant.'
It really bothers me when people say we live in a postracial America.
Confidence definitely did not get me here! More of, like, desperation.
I love my community. I love always being able to come back and have a home.
Biblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity.
My mother helped to integrate the local elementary school in the nineteen-sixties.
One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.
I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.
As an artist, I feel a certain responsibility to write about difficult subject matter.
We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Physical books are still my favorite, but I own an e-book reader. They're convenient for travel.
I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.
I think that often in the United States we're very blind to the ways that history lives in the present.
It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.
That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.
It took me a long time to write again because Katrina destroyed the home I loved, and that robbed me of hope.
In American culture at large, but especially in African American culture, it's a sign of weakness to ask for help.
At every turn, Molly Antopol's gorgeous debut story collection, 'The UnAmericans,' is firing on multiple cylinders.
I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.
People are not afraid to be activists, to be vocal. And I think back to my years in college, and that wasn't the case.
I think that I'm trying to hopefully change my children's ideas about what is possible, and about what is possible for them.
There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private
If I could chat with anyone, it would be Claire Messud, because I think she could tell me how to get better as a writer as I age.
One of the most important things that I want for my kids is I want them to live. You know, I want them to live to see 21 and beyond.
I lived in San Francisco and did the Stegner fellowship for two years, and it was amazing. From fall 2008 to spring 2010, I was there.
While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.
As a reader, sometimes, I just want to not think. You know, I want to read something that is purely enjoyable: that is, like, escapist.
I am grateful to the activists and women who created the Black Lives Matter movement because I feel like they let me know I wasn't crazy.
On one hand, I am very pessimistic, but on the other hand, if I didn't believe that speaking up would do something, I wouldn't have spoken.
I grew up in a lot of different homes when I was younger: my parents rented trailers and small, boxy houses set high on cement block pillars.
I thought about all those people whose suffering had been erased, and I thought, 'Why can't they speak? Why can't I undo some of that erasure?'
When I look back on my reading habits when I was really young, I was really drawn to stories about strong girls who in some ways are outsiders.
Faulkner is a really important figure in southern literature. I wrestle with him and his legacy every time I sit down and write a piece of fiction.
I'm from a small town on the bottom edge of Mississippi, very near New Orleans and the Louisiana border. My family has lived there for generations.
My time in New York really clarified things for me. I thought, 'What could I do with my life that would give it meaning?' And writing was that for me.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
When I read 'Absalom, Absalom!,' I remember being really excited about it and telling all my friends they had to read it, especially my writer friends.
History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.
People ask me all the time, 'Why did I move home?' As well as I can articulate it, that's why. I moved home because I love the community that I come from.