Carol Ann Duffy Quotes

My narrative style centers around intimate, highly subjective depictions of personal experience and internal landscapes. In 'March,' everything fell into place as soon as I began identifying strongly with John Lewis as a young boy and saw how we shared the same kind of gravity and intensity as youngsters.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'

My children are now all grown. Some are in their 60s. But when they call and I answer the phone, they say, 'How are you?' And before I can answer, they ask, 'Is Mother there?'

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

My parents were married for sixty-five years, and I was married for about ten minutes, my first year at Yale Drama School. Something, somehow, didn't get passed on to my generation.

It's hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you're lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction.

Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.

Cinema gives you the opportunity to be both a grandparent and a grandchild whereas in life you cannot be both at the same time.

I've been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don't tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

I haven't read a lot of science fiction, and I never intend to write it; it seems to happen a little bit inadvertently for me, in that I'm trying to follow people into points in their lives that demand that I investigate the future.

My daughters prefer Tears for Fears songs as they're more upbeat and generic. Dad's songs are 'a little too sad' for them, which just means that they're harder to understand.

I think it's true about people now being closer to their parents, since the '60s, really. The parents are no longer from a different planet, the 1950s ideas of American family. We could be friends with our parents. After the '60s, it wasn't like a person smoking pot was what the parents would be appalled at.

With "Margaret," I remember clearly it was, you know because I did remember it clearly. I was young. I was young in terms of experience and what did I know about and I had an incredible memory from my own childhood. And so it never occurred to me to write for any other age group. And I thought I'm going to write a book and I'm going to tell the truth.

The stuff I write isn't strictly autobiographical, but it's personal, if that makes any sense. It draws all these little incidents and people out of my life and then contorts them.

Though she doesn't remember any trauma, she said that her parents told her she cried on a daily basis and her grandmother resorted to passing out candy so the kids would play with her. Though it was a humorous moment, Mila said, "I know, God bless her. She's an amazing, amazing woman."

All writers, musicians, artists, choreographers/dancers, etc., work with the stuff of their experiences. It's the translation of it, the conversion of it, the shaping of it that makes for the drama.

I learn about the highs and lows of living with the same mother for your entire life, about how no one can make you angrier, but how you can't really love anyone more.

Yeah, and the language the "we" has, and the character the "we" has. Because that was the part of the book that I didn't plan out, but the part that I was most curious about as I was writing. You know what you're doing, but you're sometimes still sort of curious as you're writing it.

I feel like an artist often turns the camera on themselves and on their own families to understand who they are.

When you're writing, at least when I'm writing, I don't think about themes and I try not to sermonize with any particular message.

My parents only played Isley Brothers, Marvin Gaye. That's when New Kids came out, and we wanted to jam that. My mom was like, "Put that thing off and put my damn record on". So from old school to '90s to recent, it's just always been there.

When I choose material for an album all these songs I grew up with pour into my head.