Suheir Hammad Quotes

I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

My father told me, "Don't do anything that would bring shame to the family." I was always mindful of that. When I told him I wanted to pursue a career as an actor, my father said, "Look at what you see on television at the movies, is that what you want to be doing? Do you want to make a life out of that?" And I said, "Daddy, I'm going to change it".

I'm not sure I would have ever decided to try to write when I was forty-five if I hadn't already gotten that degree [in English].

When I'm traveling to promote my book, I feel like an artful impostor. What I really am is when I'm in my (painter's) studio and when I'm writing. With actors, it's the same thing. They're kind of artful impostors in public. When you get to know them, they're different people.

To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.

I only went to the third grade because my father only went to the fourth and I didn't want to pass him.

You marry a non-graduate, then you are going to worry if your son or daughter is going to make it to the university.

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

I look at albums like novels. If you write a really good scene or a really good moment, just because you wrote it, doesn't mean that it fits with the story that you're writing.

Hip-hop was the culture that I grew up with; I am part of this culture.

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.~

If I was tall and blonde, I might have been a dancer or singer.

You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them--well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies.

I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing - I mean, I think it's blueprinting.

Most [people] see education only as the means by which a person is transported from one economic plane to a higher one.

the finest achievements are those of the pen. ... To me God the Father is a writer.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was.... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family.

I found it was my good fortune to somehow be able to work in these forms that I loved when I was a kid. I love movies and I could write screenplays. I love theater and I could write plays. I mean, they would be my own, I could never write what was used to be called the well-made play. But my first play, "Little Murders," turned out to be a great success and a great influence on plays at that time.

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.

... oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love--not this efficient, philanthropic self.

Just because I have a guitar, it doesn't mean that changes me. I still rhyme, I still sing.

You don't want to do what your parents want you to do. You got your own things. And the whole idea of getting a job because of who your father is - that didn't isn't right.

I just try to be true to myself and write about things I'm passionate about. I think what most people don't like about movies is they can tell that most movies are a product, and they don't mean that much to the people who make them.