Yusef Komunyakaa Quotes

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.

The process of writing a book has given me a whole new reverence for writers. Mechanically, it is a brutal process; emotionally, it's incredibly healing.

Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system.

Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.

I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.

I find writing really hard, but then, every author I know finds writing really hard work.

I had never written anything before in my life except maybe in high school when I wrote a short story, and my mother had to put an ending on that.

I'm not a fast writer at all. I come empty and wait upon the Lord. So it really is all a waiting process, a patient process.

I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result of something having gone cold and dead because of a hiatus. Telling, you see, is the same as a hiatus. It means you're not doing it.

Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately, you are always bad before you can get a little better.

When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words.

My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn't write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad, I expanded it, and poured in more and more? After I started to do that, I became free in my writing.

Ever since I was twelve, I dreamed of being an author. I just never had the fortitude to see any of my stories through to completion. I would start a book, get a few chapters in, and grow bored or get distracted by something else.

It took me ten years to write a proper story. I floundered about trying to shape something, counting on the 'feeling' I had as I wrote, only to discover upon rereading my work that the feeling had disappeared, and what remained was an empty shell.

Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems.

I had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn't work.

I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.

For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.

Well, you know, I'm quite a reluctant writer. I'm not someone who set out to be a writer or really wanted to be.

I just love language. I mean, I love it. I love stage directions. Any opportunity to write. I hadn't written in so long, I get very crazy and miserable. I - it's like not seeing my kids: I can't do it for very long.

I have dreamt of being an author since the age of 14, and writing about my experiences has always been a part of digesting an experience and sharing it with others.

I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.

The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter.