Top 100 Black Writing Quotes
#1. There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.
George Bernard Shaw
#2. This was my first indication of the quality I feel is most characteristic of Zora's work: racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.
Alice Walker
#3. Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor.
Charles Willeford
#4. I use very little red. I use blue, yellow, a little green, but especially ... black, white and grey. There is a certain need in me for communication with human beings. Black and white is writing.
Hans Arp
#5. Freedom to speak and write about public questions is as important to the life of our government as is the heart to the human body. In fact, this privilege is the heart of our government. If that heart be weakened, the result is debilitation; if it be stilled, the result is death.
Hugo Black
#6. For some artists the live performance is the chicken before the egg of writing or recording of repertoire. For other artists the writing or recording of repertoire is the chicken before the egg of live performance.
Frank Black
#7. Yes I am aware of the rules.
Yes I can totally see how I err the Queen.
Yes it is this very fact of slaying her language.
That gives my soul its melodies.
Malebo Sephodi
#8. Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
A.S. Byatt
#9. To this day I have a profound mistrust of the word processor. I have to type it or write it first, screen it and only then enter it for posterity onto the word processor.
Shane Black
#10. When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?
Claudia Rankine
#11. When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
Carl Sandburg
#12. I've been writing Indian music for a while. Indian music is about Mother Earth, and mine is no exception.
Jimmy Carl Black
#13. By all means, tell the cops about the crazy robot lady with the black leather body suit and the Kill Bill sword. Hope you like straitjackets.
J.D. Cunegan
#15. For the most part I write very stream of consciousness. I basically need to be recording an entire writing session because it's almost like I black out and just start singing whatever is on my mind and forget it as soon as I stop.
Beth Moore
#16. Rejection is part of the game. Or rather, rejection is part of the profession. A profession which at times can feel like a game.
Robin Black
#17. Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.
H.G.Wells
#18. You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.'
Elizabeth McCracken
#19. I looked inside my typewriter. There's a city in there. Black and grey columns and no inhabitants.
Helen Oyeyemi
#20. When Shonda Rhimes writes her autobiography, it should be called How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman.
Alessandra Stanley
#21. Part of the acting gig is when you're let loose some improvs and put stuff into your own words every once in a while. That doesn't get you a writing credit or more money. It just makes it more fun.
Jack Black
#22. The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing. Where this ideal has come from I have no idea, and as I now see it before me, in black and white, it almost seems perverse.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#23. What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet.
August Wilson
#24. The characters that I have on Twitter have very little resemblance to me, the person who's writing them.
Michael Ian Black
#25. This world rubs me raw, scours me smooth like an SOS pad put to a grease-caked skillet. And pain: it stabs and scrapes and pulls me back to earth, my final B&B, that worm-spun cot of cool black sod.
Chila Woychik
#26. For a perfect holiday I need my iPhone and my writing tools. I write all my books by hand so black felt pens and yellow legal pads are a must. And my eyebrow pencil. I'm very low-maintenance.
Jackie Collins
#27. My process is surprisingly straightforward. I find myself with little to do over a stretch of time and I say, "I should write children's books today." Then I sit down and write a children's book, and if it takes more than, realistically, three hours, I feel like I've done something wrong.
Michael Ian Black
#28. I think because I came into journalism by way of the Black Panther Party - and not J-school or a corporate bourgeois institution - I tried to do news, writing and reporting that had social, political and racial content and context.
Mumia Abu-Jamal
#29. I have little or no concern at how people interpret my writing, my only concern is to write it.
Robert Black
#30. I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind of what keeps me accountable.
Kiese Laymon
#31. ....and on occasion I like to write in pencil, because I need to know that I can erase the words, even if I never do.
Bruce Black
#32. I, sole heir to the Munodi line and memory, am childless. A friend who knows such things has told me that this explains my compulsion to capture what I can with black ink on white paper." ("The Volatilized Ceiling of Baron Munodi")
Rikki Ducornet
#33. Make your skin as thick as you are able to, for your career. Keep it as thin as you can tolerate, for your art.
Robin Black
#34. I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.
Kary Mullis
#35. I must admit it's a surprise to find myself still here, still talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn't: I'm saying nothing, you're hearing nothing. The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air.
Margaret Atwood
#36. My own sense of the world is that very little is absolute or black and white or easily understood. I suppose in all my writing I'm trying to cast the reader into this spiritually ambivalent dream world, which hopefully mirrors more honestly the complex reality we find ourselves in.
Andre Dubus
#37. The darkness has ink eyes, and if you stare long enough, you're going to see it blink black. That's the moment to start writing.
Jarod Kintz
#38. Kids love to be silly, they love to laugh, so I think it was natural for my kids to like the sort of books that I write - and it's the only kinds of books I'm capable of writing.
Michael Ian Black
#39. Writing is like this
you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.
Paul Engle
#40. I use a lot of humor in my writing. But it's completely black humor.
Kurt Vile
#41. All writers pen sad stories to garner sympathy, writing is after all for the abandoned of the society: the ink-leech, spewing black blood and sucking innocent souls.
Aporva Kala
#42. Writing is like a charcoal painting, a black and white story
Dave McDonald
#43. Freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have, or the views they express, or the words they speak or write.
Hugo Black
#44. Dear Mrs. Black: On seven prior occasions this company has denied your claim in writing. We now deny it for the eighth and final time. You must be stupid, stupid stupid, stupid!
John Grisham
#45. And besides, I'm not a writer. I don't go to coffeehouses and smoke, wear black, and analyze Sylvia Plath to the point of depression.
Megan McCafferty
#46. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#47. I hate white people writing for black people; it's so offensive. So we go out and look specifically for African-American voices.
Lee Daniels
#48. It's amazing what I could've written in my life if I had realized that I should keep writing and not masturbating.
Lewis Black
#49. The whistle dropped from the branch's spindly fingers like a black cocoon, a pendulum of secret music; the wind pushed sound soundlessly around.
Karen Russell
#50. Where he saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words. Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of a common sparrow.
Nicole Krauss
#51. When I die I hope it may be said:
'Her suffering was black, but her books were read'.
Shannon L. Alder
#52. Black is the most slimming of all Colors. It is the most flattering. You can wear black at any Time. You can wear it at any age. You can wear it for almost any occasion. I could write a book about black.
Christian Dior
#53. I'm an aspiring writer.' I hate that phrase. You're either a writer or you're not.
Jake Black
#54. You cannot write the pages you love without writing the pages you hate. Nothing that you write is pointless, useless, or unnecessary. The product requires the process. The good days may be more enjoyable, but the tough ones are the ones they're built upon.
Robin Black
#55. It was weird - writing is a stupid thing to do. I come up here in the morning to a pleasant room in the roof of my house and imagine I'm a black South American football superstar; then I have to imagine I'm a female pop celebrity who's pregnant. It's a completely mad way to spend your time.
Mal Peet
#56. I love writing about black women, but if you go beyond that, we're human beings - and because we're human beings, it's universal for everybody.
Mara Brock Akil
#57. It is with great disappointment and regret that after having the privilege of writing and performing the music of The Black Crowes over the last 24 years, I find myself in the position of saying that the band has broken up.
Rich Robinson
#58. Writing is thinking and thinking is hard work.
Lewis Black
#59. In the future, as in the present, as in the past, black people will build many new worlds.
This is true. I will make it so. And you will help me.
N.K. Jemisin
#60. Writers begin with a grain of sand, and then create a beach.
Robert Black
#61. Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.
Guy De Maupassant
#62. For years I was doing the excruciating weightlifting of writing scripts - but then I stayed thin and someone else got all the muscles.
Shane Black
#63. There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.
Rebecca Solnit
#64. I've made a career writing about fictitious anti-heroes. To create these worlds, I've spent a lot of time with active members on both sides of the law. And if I had to pick the most interesting of the two, the choice is obvious - we all love the guys in black.
Kurt Sutter
#65. How do you paint a writer's block?
Just fill it with fifty shades of black.
Ana Claudia Antunes
#66. I hope there is something worthy in my writings and not merely the novelty of a black face associated with the power to rhyme that has attracted attention.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
#67. I write because I am a Black woman, listening attentively to her people.
Maya Angelou
#68. Richard Price, who has made a fortune writing fake ghetto books, says he takes a cab into the ghetto, transcribes Black speech for a brief time and returns home. His fake ghetto books have bought him a townhouse in Gramercy Park and home on Staten Island.
Ishmael Reed
#69. The good thing about being undiscovered is that every time you begin a new writing project it feels like this work will be the best one you have done, this one will be better than the last, a higher standard of writing, and that's the way it should be.
Robert Black
#70. I read 'Sabella or The Blood Stone' by Tanith Lee, which was hugely influential to me. I love Tanith's writing. She's just really lyrical, beautiful use of language.
Holly Black
#71. There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.
August Wilson
#72. Bright yellow leaves flowed swiftly upon the dark, almost-black water, making patterns as they went. To Mr. Segundus the patterns looked a little like magical writing. 'But then,' he thought, 'So many things do.
Susanna Clarke
#73. I was dressed up as a witch for Halloween, and wanted to write a story about my black cat before I went out trick-or-treating. I think it went out with the trash the next day.
Robin Hobb
#74. If I describe a person's physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is "black" or "white." I may describe the color of their skin - black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I'm not talking about race.
Jamaica Kincaid
#75. I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.
Octavia Butler
#76. I'm going to write about them as I took them -- with a smile.
Jack Black
#77. There are words that I wouldn't say because they hurt people's feelings. I just happen to be a white guy who writes for a lot of black comedians but if I wrote for a lot of gay comedians there might be stuff I would say then.
Neal Brennan
#78. One of the great things about writing middle-grade books is that it's really a nice break, when you're writing super intense stuff like 'Coldtown', to be able to write something a little lighter - calm down and do something different.
Holly Black
#79. What happened, of course, was that I was writing a play set in the 1940's that was supposed to be somehow representative of black American life, and I didn't have any women in there. And I knew that wasn't going to work.
August Wilson
#80. I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored. She said, "Then write something. Then you can read it." In fact, I had just learned to read, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something - and then read it!
Joan Didion
#81. When I was writing about the Republican primaries, it was as though the Bible was a black box that people reached into to pull out edicts and prejudices and rules and opinions, and I wish they had fact-checked it! Especially Rick Santorum.
Walter Kirn
#82. I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition
about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.
Maya Angelou
#83. That day, that day when I can gaze at the sea
both of us calm
and I, trusting, having poured my whole heart into my Life Work ... when death
black waves!
no longer courts me and I can smile, constantly, at everything because, my bones, there will be so little of myself left to give it.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
#84. I'm not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.
Holly Black
#85. One page a day, seven a week, thirty or thirty-one to the month. Fishing in his pocket for a tip, he came up with his pen, a thick black fountain pen. Fountain: it seemed less flowing, less forthcoming than that, in shape more like a bullet or a bomb. ("Novelty")
John Crowley
#86. When it comes to work, I will stop at nothing. When it comes to writing, I will never stop.
Robert Black
#87. When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit.
Maureen Dowd
#88. I grew up wearing black arm-bands when the hunger strikers died. I went on those marches. I grew up basically a Provo, though I never obviously got into any activities. I was writing 'IRA, Brits out' on walls all over where I grew up, but that was a false sense of Irishness.
Glen Hansard
#89. The only solution was to try to unmake the world, to make it black and silent and uninhabited again, to return to the moment before the Big Bang, in the beginning when there was the Word, and to live in that vacuous uncreated space alone with the Word.
John Green
#90. A sign read "Free drinks for billiards competitors only." Hand-lettered below read "All others will pay." It was written in blood. I could tell because a red fairy with what looked like black insect wings was writing it at the time, with his own dismembered finger.
Red Tash
#92. Rick Black writes with the honed elegance of a poet so in command of lyric sentiment and the efficient evocative use of language that what results is indeed as urgent and vulnerable as true prayer ... There is something profoundly human and completely necessary about Star of David.
Kwame Dawes
#93. I write flawed characters. Ones that do not always make the best decisions and are driven by ambition or lust. They are not black or white, they are in the large space that exists between.
Kevin James Breaux
#94. Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones.
Hermann Hesse
#95. I don't know what gives me more pleasure: watching my story unfold or going in and watching a room full of black people talking for me and writing words for black people.
Lee Daniels
#96. Before me and beside me sat a row of the comeliest young men, clad in black gowns and wearing on their shoulders long hoods trimmed in white fur. Who and what they were I know not, for I preferred not to learn, lest by chance they should not be so mediaeval as they looked.
Henry James
#97. I didn't have a motive. I didn't to it. You did. What are you writing?"
"Motive - Don't know."
"What do you mean Don't know? I tell you I hadn't got one. Put None."
"You must have one. If you kill people without one, you're mad.
Pamela Branch
#98. I attribute the black tones in my films to Stephen King, Tim Burton, Joe Hill and Richard Matheson. However, most of my writing is influenced by mental health. I'm incredibly passionate about shedding light on the stigmas associated with mental illnesses.
Anna Akana
#99. I intend to keep writing Christmas songs. There's still a lot more about Christmas that can be captured and feel like old-time Christmas. A lot of the traditions haven't been explained in song.
Clint Black
#100. The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing.
Octavia Butler
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