Akira Kurosawa Quotes

I liked the name Saadiq and didn't want to be known as an artist as Raphael Wiggins.

Like all artists, I'm a complete cinephile; I see everything. I see past movies, present movies, indie movies, experimental movies.

I don't really do anything that isn't about writing, and I don't really know who I am if I'm not thinking about writing.

I have this identity for myself as a writer and the only thing that can happen is that I chip away from it.

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

I've spent most of my life writing and developing everything that I've wanted to be in - which is why I started writing in the first place.

If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.

I'm not a rock star writing poetry. I don't feel like a rock star and I don't know what one is, actually. I'm a goalie/poet or a hotel guest/poet or a father/poet.

For me, it is freedom, freedom from everything: when I write, I'm not a woman. I'm not a Muslim. I'm not a Moroccan. I can reinvent myself, and I can reinvent the world.

I feel like Black Thought is a name that has so much meaning and depth, not only to me but to my fans, that it's something that I wanted to hold onto a little bit tighter.

I've probably spent a good year and half of my life watching movies. I love it. It was something I knew I'd be happy doing.

For years, I kept the two separate: Michael Horse the artist and Michael Horse the actor. I like the acting, but I'm an artist; that's my identity.

I identify as an agent when I'm agenting, and I identify as an author when I'm writing. I expect both those things to be true for as long as I'm able to do them.

I've never not been sure that I was a photographer any more than you would not be sure you were yourself. I was a photographer, or wanting to be a photographer, or beginning - but some phase of photographer I've always been.

I see myself in everything I write. All the good guys are me.

What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.

You don't want to watch classics with me 'cause I'm constantly writing notes.

The feeling of being an outsider, and the identity theme, are hardwired into me. If there's anything really autobiographical in my fiction, it's that feeling. I always feel that way.

I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!

I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

I feel terribly vulnerable and 'not-myself' when I'm not writing.

I think in Arabic at times, but when I'm writing it's all in English. And I don't try to make my English sound more Arabic, because it would be phony - I'm imagining Melanie Griffith trying to do a German accent in Shining Through. It just wouldn't work. But the language in my head is a specific kind of English. It's not exactly American, not exactly British. Because everything is filtered through me, through my experience. I'm Lebanese, but not that much. American, but not that much. Gay, but not that much. The only thing I'm sure of, really, is that I'm under 5'7".

For a stretch of time, I got really caught up in the idea that what people liked about my work was that I was a young guy who was trying to be cool by writing about young people and a certain kind of Bay Area culture that I was tangentially a part of.

Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"?

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.