Alice Walker Quotes

Art for me is like breathing.

I nearly always write — just as I nearly always breathe.

Artists, like yourself, are born with a need to express that's just innate.

For me, writing Bridget's [Jones] stories is an instinctive, organic thing, which tends to happen more by accident than design.

Something that you feel will find its own form.

When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.

As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.

I'm pretty self-conscious, so I tend to work in a way where I say what I need to say and get out rather than revisit things. It's kind of a collage style. I realized that it had more emotional weight that way. I'll always be in the developmental stages as far as being a songwriter.

All art is autobiographical.

I never sit down to write or say, "Today, I have to record something." I wait to hear it and then I go for it.

I think my painting is so autobiographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it.

My concern is with the rhythms of nature I work inside out, like nature.

Every artist - even if they do Superman, they do Batman, and things like that - they are speaking about his life. Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.

I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.

It's an organic thing that I try not to analyze too much, because I worry that it will go away.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.

I think that, when you're writing your songs, there's always a debate about whether, is that you in the song? Is it not you in the song?

Of all the songs that I've written since I was 15 or 16, every song is different every song is special, it happens in a different way and I like that.

I am a reflection of what I sing. Sometimes I have to get serious because the things Ive been through are serious.

I'd like to get something small and self-generated in before Black Rock has whatever life that it has.

My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him orderthe architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man's knowledge, not according to his own.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff. But there's this thing that happens when the song first comes out, that sort of magic when it first comes out of the ether, and you can't even really explain where it comes from. That happens so much with music, and people understand that with music. But I really think that a lot of movie and TV should be the same way.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!