Bell Hooks Quotes

I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.

Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.

I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

My favorite on screen moments are when you are really there and you know you're creating something. That's so exciting... it's why you come to work.

If you're concentrating so damn hard on a piece of mathematics or a musical - a piece of music or a piece of art, the restraint that holds the rest of - the rest of the world back off and vanishes in the rest of your life.

Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness.

When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.

If I'm really working on something, writing or painting or really concentrating, I don't even think about brushing my hair.

Being an artist is celebrating life.

Art is a little bit larger than life - it's an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

My boyfriend's a musician, and I think when he's on stage is the only time he's not worrying. And so that's the reason he keeps doing it is because it gives him that sort of experience of weightlessness that I only get out of being sort of, deep into writing something or really lost in a moment on set, like it's available to me in these select moments through my work.

Men are born to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.

Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It's better not to think about it so much and just let it happen.

It takes isolation and solitude for me to write.

You don’t think when you play music, you just try to play and be in it. It is the same for me when the writing is going really well. It’s the same kind of feeling. I’m just in it. It’s not the words, it’s not the sentences, I’m not aware of it. Then it’s good.

I'd rather get back to making art than talk about it.

Because I'm so busy and because I think of myself as a painter, I desperately guard the time that I have to paint. And sometimes I'm irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.

Sometimes I write with music on, and if I'm in a good flow, I don't even hear it.

When I'm making a film, I'm obsessive about what I do, and I get totally into it. That's all I'm eating, breathing, living at that moment.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

If I were to try and find a unifying emotion that kept me calm and focused while I was dancing or writing or solving a math problem, I think the one unifying thing about all those that keeps my interest is creativity.