#authors

Don't say Fili, sister. Say Pili. In Tagalog, pili means to choose. Pino means fine. Pilipino equals 'fine choice. ↗

— Jessica Hagedorn The Gangster of Love

#filipino-authors #identity #nationality #equality

On Slavery: The saddest slap in the face is we have NO monument, no real statues or memorials, no special day of Atonement or Remembrance (NOT ONE), no thanks for 400+ years of free labor, forced servitude across the Trans-Atlantic, ass beatings, buying ourselves and families out of slavery, rape and plunder...but everyone else has monuments, special museums, and even movies. This is what America thinks of black people, so-called black president and all, who has been largely silent on this subject...we'll even celebrate Leprechauns, Easter Bunnies, and Secretary's Day before we acknowledge our history. ↗

— Brandi L. Bates

#african-americans #black-panthers #black-people #blacks #huey-newton

The boy didn't know where he and his family were, other than one name: Mississippi. ↗

— Larry Brown

#family

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#books #writers #imagination

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#authors #creativity #imagination #imagination

We do not wait for inspiration. We work because we've jolly well got to. But when all is said and done, we toil at this particular job because it's turned out to be our particular job, and in a weird sort of way I suppose we may be said to like it. ↗

— Ngaio Marsh

#writing #inspirational

You can, of course, write to inspire others… but most importantly, you must write to inspire yourself. ↗

— Jessica Swan

#inspirational

The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych." [Colm Tóibín, Novelist – Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013] ↗

— Colm Tóibín

#conceit #critique #diptychs #grandeur #novelists

It doesn't have to be dreads. You can wear an Afro, or braids like you used to. There's a lot you can do with natural hair ↗

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#black #hair #race #women #nature

No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out. ↗

— Bohumil Hrabal

#books #brains #sleep #underwear #authority