Quotes about Writing

About 40 years ago I had an experience where I wrote a tract.

I keep a hotel room in my town, although I have a large house. And I go there at about 5:30 in the morning, and I start working. And I don't allow anybody to come in that room. I work on yellow pads and with ballpoint pens. I keep a Bible, a thesaurus, a dictionary, and a bottle of sherry. I stay there until midday.

Of course, there are those critics - New York critics as a rule - who say, 'Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it's good but then she's a natural writer.' Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

I called the doctor, during writing the book, the psychiatrist who treated me at that time, Dr. Jackson. And I said, Dr. Jackson, whole pieces are missing. I don't understand what happened to me.

The way for a person to develop a style is to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.

Writing is a form of mischief.

It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

The writers who get my personal award are the ones who show exceptional promise of looking at their lives in this world as candidly and searchingly and feelingly as they know how and then of telling the rest of us what they have found there most worth finding. We need the eyes of writers like that to see through. We need the blood of writers like that in our veins.

I believed God had wired me as a writer for a purpose, and I was squandering that purpose. I finally repented of doing things my way and told God that, in the future, I would only write books that glorified Him. That meant I had to buy back some of my contracts.