I'm a big fan of things in writing in general that are subtle, that suggest something without actually in-your-face saying it.
I'm a big fan of things in writing in general that are subtle, that suggest something without actually in-your-face saying it. And it's funny, I've started to notice it, I started to see it after a while, that that's kind of a way of writing that I was doing. But I didn't set about to do that.
A lot of guys get slammed pretty hard. I do think there's a tendency with women performers to just sort of write them off. The "Flavor of the Month" kind of thing. Or as a novelty, because I do think women in bands are still considered a novelty, or a little confection.
The kind of response I hope for when I write my novels for children: to give them a chance to recognize something of their own feelings -- about themselves, their parents, their friends -- and their own situation as a kind of subject race, always at the mercy of the adults who mostly run their lives for them.
I've been a little disappointed in directors in America. I'm really after a theater that doesn't just deal with the actual texts that I brought in. But with a director that really deals with images too, that takes the play to another level. We have to remember that theater takes place in the third dimension, and we have to take into consideration the visual aspect of the play. I think images are important for the theater. Because I do write images.
I think that the Pulitzer Prize is definitely a blessing, but it's also a curse. Because I think that it is a blessing because the work gets more exposure, especially that particular play and then other works of yours too. And then it's a curse because people anticipate that you will write something like you've already written. I think it's really wrong because, you know, I think, as a writer, I'm in a process and I'm somewhere in that process, and I need to continue to develop.
I was taught to lie at a young age. . . . I think that [A PARK IN OUR HOUSE] describes what people make out of their reality in a totalitarian system like Castro's. They take flight and move into the imagination in order to transcend their immediate reality. I had to write this play. It helped me understand my own loss of innocence.
I find it's very confusing when one critic tells you one thing and one tells you something completely different. Unless all the critics agree on parts of the play that just didn't work. I have stopped reading reviews, because I find writing is all about courage. You must have courage when you start writing a play and you cannot have the voice - you must write things out. You cannot have the voice of a critic telling you, "That didn't work in that play, you cannot make it work in another play." Every time you do a production, it's an experimentation.
I have a really, really difficult time with dramaturgy sometimes in America, because I write about other cultures. I write about a culture that is very difficult, it is very foreign to a North American. A lot of people don't know about what's happening.
I'm very much inspired by the Latin music, especially the romantic boleros. Not that when I sit to write a play I listen to boleros. But I think it's part of my DNA, it's part of my upbringing. I grew up in a house where this is the kind of music my parents used to listen to. This is the kind of music I would even hear in my neighborhood. I think that sort of romanticism is part of the culture.
[To write poems] I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.
Language instruction should start in the first grade. Writing, also.
You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.
I always come from a female perspective and a strong music base, trying to keep a positive slant on things. It's important for you to do what you love and not let anyone bring you down, and I keep that message throughout. I like writing songs all females can relate to - songs about when you're a chick and you get your heart broken and you go shopping.
The thing I liked about writing about food when I started it was that I felt I was writing about food in a different way. Not like a food writer.
I wanted to write a story that demanded the viewer's attention.
The trick is the paradox - turning your story inside out. Now if it is something that appears to be of total normality and then suddenly turns inside out and is a different thing all together then that's fun to write.
One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person.
What interests me very much as a writer is the ability for writing to have our lives to be occupied so vividly by others. I think that's what we long for as writers.
Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.
I do realize that the reader needs some form of resolution. Sometimes I think of it almost like writing a musical score where things have to harmonize and certain lines have to come to a close.
The rhyme always knows better than you, and leads you to places where you wouldn't otherwise have gotten to and that is absolutely the case. Leading off from formal poetry, there is something about when you pay attention to form and you allow it to have its own laws and you listen to those laws you really do end up in places you wouldn't otherwise go. Which isn't to say that I believe in following the rules when I write. I don't. Each of the forms in my books feels to me new.
A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.
I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect.
I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.
