Margo Jefferson Quotes

I grew up in New York City. In elementary school, I was a charter member of the Scribble Scrabble Club, and in high school, my poems were published in an anthology of student poetry.

One can make a case that says that since 85% of children being brought up in single family homes are being brought up by women that about 85% of elementary school teachers should be males to balance out the feminization that the boys and girls receive.

My dad worked for a generator company and then UC Berkeley, and my mom was as a dental hygienist and then eventually a history teacher. My uncles and aunts, all of them are elementary school teachers or scientists.

I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.

You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.

I just submitted what I had to the 'Octopus Books' contest open reading period, and they said they wanted to publish my poetry book. Then I started to publish more and more poetry because people would ask me to do readings or ask me submit something for their journal.

My elementary school teachers were big on pushing kids to read. If you read a certain amount of books, they would provide you with incentives, sort of like what we are doing with the WrestleMania Reading Challenge.

I wanted to be a writer for a while. I was an excellent child writer. I won multiple poetry contests. I was published at age three - I think that was more about novelty than my immense talent.

Figuring the average poet starts at 16, I am 23.

I believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own thoughts.

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

I never wrote anything that was published until I was forty.

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

you want to write a book for so many reasons ... The main reason ... is because it will make you well-known and beloved and popular and successful and famous and respected. You also write ... to make money, but that motivation is not first on the list.

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

I wrote when I was a young teen, but I didn't put an eye on the available markets until I was seventeen. The next ten years felt like a self-centered experiment in personal abuse.

If you produce one book, you will have done something wonderful in your life.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

I don't know what started me, I just wrote poetry from the time was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight-and-a-half years old. It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, I suppose, I've been a bit of a professional.

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She's one of the best young writers around.

I wish writing was a talent that I had. I've tried. Unfortunately, I'm just not talented in the writing department. But, if I was, I would just write complicated roles for women because there's a lack of them.

The number of people who can copulate properly may be few; the number who can write well are infinitely fewer.

Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers.

I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer.