Writing Quotes - Page 745

I would feel really dishonest writing a song that was really sassy, or really confident, because I'm not a supremely confident being. I think that's what people find interesting about what I do; it's very different lyrically.

When we go into the 80's it has more of a pop feel. But it's what I wanted to do. I wasn't trying to reach. See, that's the thing with me, I never wanted to reach any particular crowd. I'm writing for myself. If I don't like it I won't play it for anybody.

Sometimes I'll hear some music in my head or I'll go to the piano and mess around and come up with a tune, or be on the guitar and come up with some chords - or I'll come up with lines, or just some words, or just a sentence. It could be the title of a song. I do that all the time. I write titles of songs a lot. And sometimes I'll end up writing a song that I don't have a title for and I'll say, "Oh, this goes with that title".

I didn't want to be a sideman. My own style was coming out and I was into my own writing. I wrote a whole album, I arranged it all with pencil and paper. I did eventually do a lot of work with my father, but that was different. I was living at home; I wasn't a starving musician. I wasn't spoiled, but I wasn't going to have some producer come in and tell me what to play.

If Jennifer Lopez could write songs like Fiona Apple's, she wouldn't have to spend so many hours at the gym.

I'm writing a book and working on my one-woman show, Learning To Be Human.

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act.

From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant.

It's as if I'm setting aside the husband and son, you know, the patriarchal world, for the world of the muse. This is the world of writing.

The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

No one, evidently, except me has found "No Alarms" poem ironical that an obsessive theme in my writing was - and has continued to be - not being able to write.

When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.

In publishing books and winning awards, it's like you've enjoyed this meal, you know, two months ago. How long can you be nourished by thinking about it? You've already ingested it, and you've excreted it, and that was two months ago. You had this fabulous meal. It's not going to keep you satiated today. You have to go out and get your next meal. For me, that's writing. I have to go out and hunt my next meal.

I think that's what, to me, also talks about the silences in my work - as a woman, a woman writer, when you say, "no" or you have to say, "no" so often to the writing occasion, those occasions don't really come back.

Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.

Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis is therefore poetics.

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.

Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.

I had to do the academic writing. At a top research university, publishing of a certain kind is very important. So your friend is right. You can't do three things well.

Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list.

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.

The judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then.

"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.