Maya Angelou Quotes

The delicate muses lose their head if their attention is once diverted. Perhaps if you were successful abroad in talking and dealing with men, you would not come back to your bookshelf and your task. When the spirit chooses you for its scribe to publish some commandment, it makes you odious to men and men odious to you, and you shall accept that loathsomeness with joy. The moth must fly to the lamp, and you must solve those questions though you die.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'?

I really could've been a good student, but I was always hearing an imaginary audience.

My biggest hurdle usually has to do with concentration. I have a tendency to kind of start working on something, and then, all of a sudden, I'll totally divert and do something totally different.

It is not from choice that my life is music and nothing more, but when one is an artist what else can he be? When a whole lifetime is too short to attain the heights he wants to reach, how then can he devote any of the little time he has to things outside of his art?

People who paint, including myself, get to a point where a bit of angst comes in. If you're doing it for a living, it's worth it to suffer those slings and arrows.

I think that-that anyone, the painter, the musician, the writer works in a-a kind of an-an insane fury. He's demon-driven. He can get up feeling rotten, with a hangover, or with-with actual pain, and-and if he gets to work, the first thing he knows, he don't remember that pain, that hangover-he's too busy.

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.

There are people who want to be everywhere at once, and they get nowhere

On a mission your worst enemy is idle time.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

I write compulsively. I've got so many ideas, and I love to do it so much, I can't not do it. I write the way some people do drugs.

People without clear vision are easily distracted, have a tendency to drift from one idea to another and often make foolish decisions that rob them of their dreams.

For a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.

Once, after finishing a picture, I thought I would stop for awhile, take a trip, do things-the next time I thought of this, I found five years had gone by.

Boredom ... causes us to neglect more duties than does interest.

Everything in life turns out to be a distraction from the real thing you want to do. There are a million distractions and when I was a kid I was very disciplined. I knew that the other kids weren't. I was the one able to do the thing, not because I had more talent, maybe less, but because they simply weren't applying themselves.

I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.

I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

I love Twitter. It doesn't keep me from writing and I think it's a really convenient scapegoat when the truth is that the real issue is self-control. I am totally fine admitting i have none. I'm not going to blame Twitter for affecting my writing. And also, Twitter doesn't affect my writing.

In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in.

While I am on, I can discipline myself to that extent. When I am off, I can't discipline myself at all. On the other hand, when I am off, there are so many things I like doing, it doesn't really matter.

It's just hard when you're someone who's like hurting a lot of people or deceiving people who trust you, not to bring some of that home with you or inside of you.