Writing

African-American legends in the field of literature share their thoughts on writing and how it impacts millions of people.

As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry.
June Jordan

But I do not thing black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.
Toni Morrison

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
Ralph Ellison

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Alice Walker, Wit and Wisdom of Famous American Women

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Alice Walker, Wit and Wisdom of Famous American Women

I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.
Stanley Crouch, Stanley Crouch Interview

I don't want to say that these poems have to be simple, but I want to clarify my language. I want these poems to be free. I want them to be direct without sacrificing the kinds of music, the picture-making I've always been interested in.
Gwendolyn Brooks

I don't want to say that these poems have to be simple, but I want to clarify my language. I want these poems to be free. I want them to be direct without sacrificing the kinds of music, the picture-making I've always been interested in.
Gwendolyn Brooks

I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.
Gwendolyn Brooks

I've always thought of myself as a reporter.
Gwendolyn Brooks

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are.
Alice Walker

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are.
Alice Walker

Like every other book, it would be confined by a cover and limited to type. Nevertheless, it had to have?for want of a better word?a sound, a very special sound. A sound made up of all the elements that distinguished black life (its peculiar brand of irony, oppression, versatility, madness, joy, strength, shame, honor, triumph, grace and stillness) as well as those qualities that identified it with all of mankind (compassion, anger, foolishness, courage, self-deception and vision). And it must concentrate on life as lived-not as imagined-by the people: the anonymous men and women who speak.
Toni Morrison, The Black Book

Like every other book, it would be confined by a cover and limited to type. Nevertheless, it had to have?for want of a better word?a sound, a very special sound. A sound made up of all the elements that distinguished black life (its peculiar brand of irony, oppression, versatility, madness, joy, strength, shame, honor, triumph, grace and stillness) as well as those qualities that identified it with all of mankind (compassion, anger, foolishness, courage, self-deception and vision). And it must concentrate on life as lived-not as imagined-by the people: the anonymous men and women who speak.
Toni Morrison, The Black Book

Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about. With all that's going on, how could I stop?
Gwendolyn Brooks

Of course I'm a black writer.... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.
Toni Morrison

Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.
Zora Neale Hurston

Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
Maya Angelou

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
Toni Morrison

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Maya Angelou

We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.
Nikki Giovanni

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.
Gwendolyn Brooks