My son was five months old, and I built a makeshift studio in my living room so that I could do the attachment parenting approach and write the record at the same time. That was fortuitous, that we could build that in the house.
If someone's going to talk about me, I'd want it to be positively. The way many write, you'd think only bad things were interesting. If we don't think positive, what's the use? It's a lot more fun, you know.
The first point was we wanted power to determine our own destiny in our own black community. And what we had done is, we wanted to write a program that was straightforward to the people. We didn't want to give a long dissertation.
It's too late for that - trying to second guess it. It's over. I'm worried about how to get the kids through school and still write and practice law and take power of attorney.
I know have lived, so many times, that the only thing I have left to remember is my writing, cause every single moment in life it's already written.
I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.
I've dreamed a lot of things and a lot of them have come true. The Grammy nomination was the last thing on my list before I had to write a new one. So I'm working on a new one.
Right after something happens to me, the first thing I'll do is go write when those feelings are really, really fresh. I'll hum a tune into my phone sometimes.
I never minded the random scribblings of other readers, found them interesting in fact. It is a truth universally acknowledged that people write the darndest things in the margins of their books.
You just have to make sure you're writing about something that's true. It has to be honest and it has to have a real emotion behind it, regardless of where it's coming from.
I'm not going to be rockin' n' rollin' when I'm 50 years old. But you can be in your prime on television, compose songs, or write a Broadway play when you're 50.
I've been writing on my own. It's like Roger Miller used to say, every now and then, like a dog having puppies, you have to crawl under the house and do it yourself.
When you're writing about people that are not very well off, you seem to see the kitchen sink. So it was a bit of a sort of cosy phrase that got used a bit too much.
Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.
Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again.
I need to have some depth in my characters. That's why they are all Bengalis. I can't imagine writing a book with someone called Saxena as the hero.
If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
Too many writers are trying to write with too shallow an education. Whether they go to college or not is immaterial...a good writer needs a sense of the history of literature to be successful as a writer.
These secrets are not secrets per se but are truths hidden from public view. I had to write this book. There had to be a reason I survived to tell this story.
If you write in the Old World, and against it, your work must die, go missing, be veiled, before it can live the life for which it was destined in the New World.
Some of the stuff that I write really concerns me. If I'm not institutionalised by 30 I'll seriously question the judgement of my friends and family.
