Rokia Traore Quotes

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

I'm always writing and reflecting on life. I want to suck it all in.

The words come from here. From memories, from dreams, from people I've known. I'm always writing and reflecting on life. I want to suck it all in.

There are things that you write when you're 20 and there are things that you write when you're 40 and then there are things that you write when you're old.

I had to have experience, you know what I mean? Because I've been doing this since I was 14... I couldn't write about anything at 14. I had to live some life. I definitely lived some life.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn't otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought.

As I look back on what I have written, I can see that the very persons who have taken away my time are those who have given me something to say.

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

I have never written a book that didn't teach me far more than it taught my reader.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.

The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.

The moment of recognizing your own lack of talent is a flash of genius.

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.

I think that being perceptive and having interests is nothing but an asset.

In the best writers, the outward-reaching interest in the 'found subject' leads back at a hairpin to some uncomfortable inner recognition that the writer has journeyed very far to see; he comes home half-dead.

Back when I taught middle school and wrote adult mysteries, my students often asked me why I wasn't writing for kids. I never had a good answer for them. It took me a long time to realize they were right.

Taking time to sit back and watch and think about what you've seen is important. Traveling did a great deal to me. I found that when I travel and just sit in the corner and watch, a million ideas come to me.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.