Jesmyn Ward Quotes

I suppose any person who's played somewhere for a certain amount of time and then has the opportunity to go back and just reminisce a little bit, maybe it holds a different feeling than some of the other places.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

You can revisit - the wonderful thing about my job is you can revisit your 22-year-old self or your 24-year-old self any particular night you want. The songs pick up some extra resonance, I hope, but they're still - they're there, and I can revisit that period of my life when I choose. So it's quite a nice experience.

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

I love writing dialogue - it's when I really lose myself in my work. I love reading it, too, when it's good and rings true.

The stories I work on, especially for any length of time, do tend to become personal to me.

As a professional wrestler in the position I am in, I would rather have people remember my matches for an emotion or for a certain thought it evoked when they saw it.

I wanted that song 'Saat samundar' in 'Kick.' There are many memories attached to it. The song makes 'Kick' all the more special.

I think that, as a writer, while it's your job to construct stories, you have to navigate your way through them with your heart.

I think that's what 'Stranger Things' does, it opens you up - it has a real beating heart to it.

London has always held a special place in my heart.

I'm always grateful for any kind of moment that keeps my memories alive and gives me a little taste of the excitement I used to get all the time.

You really have to do your job as a writer and push people to be as creative as possible. What's nice about the TV medium is you have such a connection to the characters that when somebody dies, the audience cries. They really feel it. You really don't cry when someone dies in a horror movie.

Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I'm a mix-tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.

Well, you know, going into any project, especially with a fan base as vocal and passionate as something as "Star Wars," you will have groups of people who will find issues with whatever it is you're doing. But our job was to tell the best story we could about characters that we loved, and we knew that we needed to go backwards to go forwards, and we needed to go back to a feeling and a place and a time.

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

are memories pictures or the secret doorway?

Tell me the tales that to me were so dear, Long, long ago, long, long ago.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

Many books that you read, they have those disclaimers that say that, "None of the events and none of the people are based on real life" and so on... Well, I don't believe that. I think that as human beings many people touch us, especially people we love the most and we can't help but do character sketches when we go to our art.

In my heart, I'm always in my rail-hosen.

This is what I want: I want to grab my brother’s hand and run back through time, losing years like coats falling from our shoulders.

Don't worry about how pretty (the story) sounds, how lilting it is, and the imagery, and the metaphor, all that. Most readers don't care. It's the people in your book that matter.

My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works.