Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

As far as writing, it's grown because I've really grown comfortable with who I am.

I love to write.

I love a mask. It's why I've got a thing about good writing. When you're acting, you're going into someone else's work. You're behind his words; it's not you.

I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say something about home.

I write for my people.

Even with the beauty stories we put out, we saw there was an opportunity to address issues of representation, identity, self-expression. We created the community that we wanted to have at 'Teen Vogue.' We were willing to lose some to have more.

I'm me, and I'm here, and I'm writing.

I write in order to belong.

First of all, all writing includes some part of the self. The relationship of the self and the other exists in writing, whether autobiographical or novel. There is a self and an other.

When I came to Los Angeles, it was the first time that I ever felt like I belong somewhere. Not because it was wacky, but because people here understood what I felt like to perform, and there were other kids my age who wanted to do it. I didn't get looked at as God, you freak.

My mother sent me to speech classes, but the other kids still teased me. I was shy. I stooped. Instead of talking, I kept journals. That's where my love of words comes from. I majored in journalism.

Over and over again, I'm trying to express or communicate these big and small struggles to the world, and really to myself.

Being an actor, you are recognized for being somebody else, whereas these books are distilled from me.

Singing is about telling a story. When you are onstage, you get to be your own self... When acting, you're someone else.

I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.

Skaters, I think they tend to be outsiders who seek a sense of belonging, but belonging on their own terms, and real respect is given by how much we take what other guys do, these basic tricks, 360 flips, we take that, we make it our own, and then we contribute back to the community the inner way that edifies the community itself.

I don't think of myself as Scottish or lesbian when I sit down and write. I am glad I have broken out of that limited audience.

As an Anglo-Indian kid in Bolton, I was basically in a minority of one. That was a source of misery, but at the same time, one of the effects of receiving the message that you don't belong to the club is that you watch the club with detachment. The fact that no one quite knew who I was was a major contributory factor in starting to write.

All that I am is me. So I'm not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist; I'm me, and these are things that I do.

I love writing - it's the best. But I really hate collaboration.

I've spent most of my life trying to wear a persona that didn't quite fit and when I started writing books, it was like finally becoming the right person.

A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.

I'm the most communal person that exists and a very solitary person. So I think writing is a form of getting to the community and being alone, and it's the best of both possible worlds.

When you catch other people with a sound like yours, that's when you know you did something.

I love to act and put on a show, but you're playing a character all the time. For music, it's really just me being myself.