Writing While Black Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. I'm an aspiring writer.' I hate that phrase. You're either a writer or you're not.

Jake Black

#5. How do you paint a writer's block?
Just fill it with fifty shades of black.

Ana Claudia Antunes

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. I've been writing Indian music for a while. Indian music is about Mother Earth, and mine is no exception.

Jimmy Carl Black

#18. You wanted to show everyone you could write about the black heart of a killer. And all the while pretending you don't even have your own dark desires.

Naoyuki Ochiai

#19. Black people were very angry with me for writing the book. A lot of people didn't believe me, or didn't want to believe me, and that used to really bother me. It was a very painful and difficult time.

LaToya Jackson

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. I write because I am a Black woman, listening attentively to her people.

Maya Angelou

#30. I'm going to write about them as I took them -- with a smile.

Jack Black

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.

Rebecca Solnit

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. Writing is thinking and thinking is hard work.

Lewis Black

#38. 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