Maya Angelou - Write Quotes

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Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'

Maya Angelou
To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.

Maya Angelou
Years ago I read a man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro. Machado de Assis is a South American writer — black father, Portuguese mother — writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn't realize all that was in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I found that the tide had come in over my head. That's when I decided to write.

Maya Angelou
Every experience shapes your writing, being stuck in a car on a lonely bridge, or dancing at a prom, being the it girl on the beach, all of those things influence your life, they influence how you write, and the topics you choose to write about.

Maya Angelou
If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution.

Maya Angelou
I know when it's the best I can do. It may not be the best there is. Another writer may do it much better. But I know when it's the best I can do. I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, No. No, I'm finished. Bye. And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won't do that.

Maya Angelou
Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.

Maya Angelou
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Maya Angelou
They've laughed to shield their crying
then shuffled though the dreams
and stepped 'n fetched a country
to write the blues with screams.

Maya Angelou
To write, I lie across the bed, so that this elbow is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses.

Maya Angelou