Diane Wakoski Quotes

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

I'm trying to get in the habit of, you know, picking up a book and learning how to write my feelings down, not my feelings but my thoughts, about things, and hopefully I'll moving toward the writing and directing thing soon.

In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.

You write an autobiography because you want to tell people how you felt about a certain matter at that time.

I've always kept a journal and brought storytelling into my teaching.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

All writers write about themselves, just as the old storytellers chose to tell stories that spoke to and about themselves. They call it the world, but it is themselves they portray. The world of which they write is like a mirror that reflects the inside of their hearts, often more truly than they know.

There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

...I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

My father always told me I should be a writer, and I found I loved writing my autobiography; writing is such an interesting process.

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.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

I wanted to tell my story in a way I haven't done before, things I've been going through in my life.

The further you go, what, I'm gonna wait til I'm 80? Naw, I'm tellin' my story now. I was just moved. I was moved to tell my story. You know? People write books all the time.

We grew out of the superhero comics, but we still liked comics, so we started putting our own experiences in the stories we were doing for our own amusement.

It's how I express myself - through storytelling and characters. They often reveal very intimate, vulnerable sides of myself.

I want to do stories that inspire people.

Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a picture book, a speech or anything, really, it has so much to do with what I'm going through personally or a problem I'm trying to work out. When I wrote my novel 'Baby,' my three children had all just gone out the door.

Actually, that's one of the things I was thinking about writing a story about me, loosely based or autobiographical. I just don't want to be like some people that are in their twenties and writing autobiographies.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.