Natasha Trethewey Quotes

I think that as a poet, I am always concerned about history and baring witness to history. But so often, it's through the research that I do, the reading.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

Anything you read can influence your work, so I try to read good stuff.

Literature has always been the greatest fuel for my imagination.

[To write poems] I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.

She’d majored in English, hoping that meant she could spend the next four years reading and writing. And maybe the next four years after that.

If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.

Salinger is such a terrific writer; he did so many great things. He is one of those writers that I still reread, simply because he makes me see the possibilities and makes me feel like writing. There are certain writers who put you in the mood to write. In the way a whiff of a cigar will bring back memories of a ballgame on a Saturday afternoon, reading Salinger makes me want to get to the typewriter.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by [Jorge Luis] Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.

But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.

There is no such thing as writer's block. There is only not enough information. If you can't write, learn something.

I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs.

I'm trying to do what Frank O'Hara did and remind myself there there's a lot of good stuff. I write about New York for my own mental health.

Who casts to write a living line, must sweat.

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.

If you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat

Read from some humbler poet, Whose songs gushed from his heart, As showers from the clouds of summer, Or tears from the eyelids start.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

[To become a poet] The most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.