Yasmine Hamdan Quotes

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.

I'm a firm believer in putting your experiences in your writing, of bleeding into the page.

Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling.

Most writers write from their own experiences. That is where the honesty and intensity of emotions come from.

In school, my favourite class was when we were given a subject for an essay on which we could freewheel. And poetry: I've always written it and loved the way words interact, in meaning and in sound.

I wrote about scenarios that I was going through and then disguised them.

That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.

Like all writers, I draw from life as I know it; but it's a refracted kind of reality, and none of it is factually true.

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

I like to think I put some of myself in every character.

I never sit down to write anything personal unless I know the subject is going to go beyond my own experience and address something larger and more universal.

I've always been drawn to stories and telling them; whether it was through being a part of theater when I was a little kid, or film, or with music, there's just been an innate desire to feel that connection.

Look at it this way - a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.