Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

I just don’t feel like I have to explain myself.

I really like hip-hop and rap; that’s my main influence. I really wanna be more of a hip-hop artist.

I’m not interested in people positioning me next to other artists.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

I wish I could shut up, but I can’t, and I won’t.

People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

Writing bores me so.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

The influence of a mother upon the lives of her children cannot be measured. They know and absorb her example and attitudes when it comes to questions of honesty, temperance, kindness, and industry.

When the external factors over which one has no control in a way start to become negative, it starts to affect our creative juices.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

My whole life is a theater piece.

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 find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

I kind of make a film for myself to sort of express myself.

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

When I did ‚Bird,‘ it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn’t in it and second because most of the films I’d been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

I’ve been known to preach.

It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

My body is quite tiny, but a lot of the emotions I feel are pretty explosive. They have to come out.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Let’s embrace being not normal!

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

I like to be in control of how I look and how I feel and how I act.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

I’m the type person, my safe place to be emotional is the booth.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

I don’t feel much pressure to fit in. I never have. I’ve always just wanted to do my thing. I have really good friends and good family, and if I don’t fit in somewhere else, I fit in at home.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

I’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

I urge everyone to be trendsetters for Azza Suleiman. Let’s make it one fashion which everyone will want to follow.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

It’d be stupid for me to sit here and say that there aren’t kids who look up to me, but my responsibility is not to them. I’m not a baby sitter.

You have a more interesting life if you wear impressive clothes.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.