Ntozake Shange Quotes

I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.

I think that all the anger and cynicism comes from suppressing things that we always wanted.

We only consult the ear because the heart is wanting.

If you don't have an outlet, you become a criminal - or misanthropic.

In many ways, anger is a misdirected plea for love.

A lot of my comedy is to do with being angry, then finding a way to channel that.

I wasn't a very academic kid, and music was the way for all that feeling and angst and sex and love and anger to be channelled.

When I left school I was full of angst, like any teenager, and I channeled it all into comedy.

You can't be angsty all day or else it becomes a sort of pale angst.

I love music. It's freedom, a way to deal with pent-up frustration.

Now when I was a teenager, I was angsty as any teenager was, but after 17 years of having a mother who was in and out of my life like a yo-yo and a father who was faceless, I was angry.

If people would write exactly what I wanted to read I wouldn't feel so compelled to write myself.

I often feel that when people have affairs, it has more to do with something they're searching for in themselves than anything else.

I'm free from holding personal anger because I can express what I want through my music.

If I look at my old lyrics, they seem to be full of rage, but empty. There was an emptiness in my life.

I have a lot of aggression in me that needs to come out in a not-very-precise or articulate way.

With Charlie Brown, it was about loneliness and isolation. I always thought that the thing about Charlie Brown and those characters was the absence of the parents. Half the strip was about who wasn't there. The parents were never in the picture.

In some ways, I've been left with this great 'idolic' image of my father, but there's a sense of absence, too. You miss his advice and, also, his getting to know the person I have become.

The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me.

For me, acting was a way of taking destructive energy and doing something productive with it, and in that way it was quite a life saver.

I know I should feel anger at my father for certain things. But since he died when I was 11, I never got to that point.

Writing is the supreme solace.

I have no clue why, but maybe sometimes when there's someone you don't hear from, it's the person you want to hear from the most.

She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.