Lena Waithe Quotes

I was raised, I feel like, on television, definitely a child of TV, and was always fascinated by storytelling.

When I was a kid, and I was watching TV, I just loved it so much that I wanted to crawl into that TV.

Television isn't inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television's the same way. If you're going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.

I've been writing since I was 7, but before that, I was orally making stories.

We love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist.

I have written stories since I was a child.

I've always, always, always listened to music since I was, like, 7 years old and made up stories in my head based on what I was hearing.

Writing will remain a passion project.

We didn't have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child.

Ever since I was 7 years old, I was writing. I remember being in the basement of my house, this dank, horrible basement, putting on plays with not-very-willing participants, and I would promise kids in the neighborhood that I'd play Nintendo 64 with them after we'd rehearse this stupid play that I wrote.

When I was a child, I'd see a movie, I took it for what it was, I enjoyed it. And if I believed it I would tend to be more interested in knowing more about it.

When I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

Youngsters are the most discerning audience. They want entertainment, they want issues.

It's a fact that kids watch TV. But if you think back, when you watched cowboy movies, you would go out and play cowboys. TV and movies motivate people.

Television has tremendous power over our lives.

I used to tell my three younger siblings stories because that was my household chore, and I told long stories in installments because it was easier and more fun than making up a new story every night. I loved it.

It's so many years of reading story. You leave work and it goes away till you see it air on television.

I like making stories and characters that people can relate to. I also like giving the audience a departure from whatever they're thinking about in their life and enjoying a show or a movie.

My poor sister was forced to be in the plays that I would write. We would go to my grandma's retirement building and perform 'Phantom of the Opera.'

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

Television is intensely personal.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

I was an avid radio fan when I was a boy, as well as a great lover of comic strips.

I'm a fan of great storytelling.