Billy Marshall Stoneking Quotes

#1. Being an American in Australia isn't easy,
but I'm trying to integrate, I'm trying to fit in.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

#2. The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn't so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

#3. The burning off and the gathering together are one.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

#4. If you would know this country, you must know its stories.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

#5. We speak for those who cannot speak. We have a duty to tell the stories for those who do not have the advantages that we have to tell stories. We must not speak falsely. The stories that we are entrusted to tell are stories of our tribes, or the tribes into which we have been initiated.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

#6. From the writer's perspective, audience is always an act of the imagination.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

#7. The ending of a story tells us what it means.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

#8. The answer to the question, 'where's the drama?' is another question: 'what's the problem?

Billy Marshall Stoneking

#9. As a writer, you can't get to where you want to be, coming from the place you started, unless you have something extremely important you want to say to someone who really doesn't want to know.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

#10. Originality has nothing to do with producing something ' new' - it is about seeking the source, the primordial ground from which you draw and have always drawn your being. It comes about when one works from one's origins, it is the dance of the eternal return ... and is as ancient as the Dreamtime.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

#11. What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

#12. Poetry is the struggle against the simplification, codification, and mummification of language, it serves as a constant redirect - moving us to the experience to which the words point.

Billy Marshall Stoneking