Amiri Baraka Quotes

The arm which should have launched the thunderbolt was occupied in guiding the pen.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.

A pen is to me as a beak is to a hen.

I write everything with fountain pens. I don't know why. I've done it since I was bar mitzvahed. I was given a fountain pen, a Parker fountain pen, and I loved it, and I've never liked writing anything with pencils or ball-points.

See this pen! I can end your lives with a stroke of this pen!

I always have a good pen with me.

You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.

Well, when I was 13, for my bar mitzvah I received my first typewriter. And that was special.

I have always been a pencil.

I wanted to be a novelist for so long.

I'm not happy unless I have a pen in my hand, it's really that simple.

I wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember.

I write in pen because it works. A fountain pen is no good for writing in the way I do because I'd have to decide, each time I stopped, how long I was likely to stop for in order to know whether or not to put the cap on. But I never know. So instead, I use a ballpoint - a Montblanc, to be precise - the most comfortably balanced pen I've ever found.

Technology must remain a tool. It's a great tool, but technology is the pen to write the book. It's not the book. If you have a great pen, maybe you'll write faster or it will look better, but at the end, you have something to say, or you don't.

I used my NEA fellowship to write my novel, 'In Country,' which was published by Harper & Row in 1985.

Ball points belong to their age. They make everyone write alike.

If you want to be a writer, all you need is a piece of paper and a pencil, and I had a manual typewriter. It doesn't cost money to write. It costs money to make art. So I would just write. I would hand out stories in the classes in high school. And the teacher would say, "Whatever you do, don't become a writer."

It is a pity he did not write in pencil. As you have no doubt frequently observed, the impression usually goes through -- a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage.

A pen went scribbling along. When it tried to write love, it broke.

A pen connects you to the paper. It definitely matters.

I'm not reading currently because I'm getting revisions of a novel. If I read while I'm writing I will unconsciously plagiarize and go to jail.

If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals.