Writing for Change Quotes

The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate.

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.

I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in '86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.

I'm still a soldier, fighting with my pen and paper for peace till the day I cease.

I don't know what gives me more pleasure: watching my story unfold or going in and watching a room full of black people talking for me and writing words for black people.

If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

To me, there's no point in writing merely to entertain.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.

I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what's going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism.

You write in order to change the world.

If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet.

I can't write about nice, easy topics because that won't change the world. And I do want to change the world - one reader at a time.

So writing became a way to get to act in things that I thought were meaningful, and hopefully write stronger roles for other women.

I am one of those authors who consider it their highest honour and their highest liberty to have a completely untrammelled chance of using their pens to serve the working people.