Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

I always felt that I was a writer, that was what I had to do.

Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.

I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.

One of the things that put me off writing for a while was that piece of advice everybody gives new writers: 'Write what you know.' Nobody would ever want to read about my boring life! But I do know a lot of things about different societies' cultures and mythologies. The way people were and are.

I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

I never want kids to walk away after a school presentation and say, 'I met a writer today.' I want them to say, 'I am a writer.'

Even if someone doesn't like it, or just likes it for me, storytelling has been the one true love story of my entire life.

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from, and I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness.

You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.

I think the novel form chose me. I was a writer before I became a criminal... my first instinct was to write.

I began writing fiction when I started running out of material in my own life.

My goal is to play characters that I feel I can contribute to and also ones I can contribute back to my life.

If you're here right now in your life, your journey continues and you've lived to tell the story.

You've got to live life to write a book about it.

I've always been a writer, I've always been a storyteller, but I never thought about screenwriting.

Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.

Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.

I'm first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can't say why I'm one.

Writing has always been an interest of mine, and 'The Language of Flowers' combined my experience with foster care with something I've always wanted to do.

As I read more and more - and it was not all verse, by any means - my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

I'm a storyteller who wants to tell untold, meaningful, universal stories in unforgettable ways. I want to do it all, study it all, and find my place in it.