Maya Angelou Quotes

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.

My drama teacher when I was a kid called me 'Zawe the activist' and I had no idea why. Now I've got older I can see why she always saw that in me.

When books are opened, we discover that we have wings

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

I think books can give rise to empowerment.

I found my voice in books.

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.

Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.

I do worry about young people in the business who have experienced a lot of success and are punted around doing those manic publicity trails, when you don't really know who you are yet.

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.

I believed my story would be helpful to young women my daughter's age, who are still in the process of forming themselves as women, and in need of encouragement to remain true to themselves.

Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.

My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.

The National Youth Theatre did one very simple but incredible thing for me: it made me realise I had choices.

The meaning I picked, the one that changed my life: Overcome fear, behold wonder.

Within each individual young person you meet, you have the same fields to plow. The trick is just to wake thmem up, to sharpen their ears for what's already there in the music.

A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

Find out who you are and be that person. That's what your soul was put on this Earth to be. Find that truth, live that truth and everything else will come.

Art helped give me confidence.