Taiye Selasi Quotes

I just write what I want to write.

I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.

My favorite thing is being able to follow my inspiration, and the freedom of being a writer is hard to beat.

I write what I want to write.

Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.

I put my soul into every book I write.

My main piece of advice would be don't worry about being published - just write a really good book, but also don't be afraid to write a bad book. Give yourself permission to fail, and don't be afraid.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

I was pretty happy with how my career had gone, mainly because of the enormous freedom I've had to write what I've wanted to write. I had a very clear picture of who I was as a writer.

Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can't write your book.

When I lived in China, my works were already being banned, and I couldn't publish. In those days, when I was in China, I was writing for myself, so that's the process of writing for myself that was the most important thing.

That's what I love about writing is you don't need anyone's permission to do it. You can just get up in the morning, grab a pad and pen and start writing.

I think writing gives me creative freedom.

I wanted to be free to write the way I wanted to write, and my impression of Christian publishing, at least in fiction, was that there wasn't room for what I wanted to write.

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

The way to write is well, and how is your own business.

I've always felt writing is an art. Publishing is a business. I felt strongly if I was going to write, I would write what I wanted to, and if the 'market' didn't respond, there was nothing I could really do about it.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

If you're writing, you're starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it's for other people - that comes in later.

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.