Terry McMillan Quotes

Being a lifetime wife and mother has afforded me the luxury of having multiple and even simultaneous careers: I've been a chauffeur. A chef. An interior decorator. A landscape architect, as well as a gardener. I've been a painter. A furniture restorer. A personal shopper. A veterinarian's assistant and sometimes the veterinarian. I've been an accountant, a banker and on occasion, a broker. I've been a beautician. A map. A psychic. Santa Claus. The Tooth Fairy. The T.V. Guide. A movie reviewer. An angel. God. A nurse and a nursemaid. A psychiatrist and psychologist. Evangelist. For a long time I have felt like I inadvertently got my master's in How To Take Care of Everybody Except Yourself and then a Ph.D. in How to Pretend Like You Don't Mind. But I do mind.

I don't live my life as a writer. I'm a mother, an African-American woman, and I do everything that everybody else does - cook and a little bit of cleaning.

Look, as my mama always said, 'One monkey don't stop no show.

Their young live were over, too, except they had to die everyday while still breathing.

It's not that marriage itself is bad; it's the people we marry who give it a bad name.

I would be content being a housewife if I could find the kind of man who wouldn't treat me like one.

Don't sabotage your own greatness by succumbing to failure!

Men cheat. They lie. They love porn. The don't respect you and don't care if they hurt you. It's the fucking breaks. Women divorce 'em 'cause we can't tame 'em or train 'em or control 'em like we do household pets. End of story.

Let me put it this way: when I read, I learned the world was not as small as my house. And that everybody in my home town was not representative of the way people in the world were raised. And that was what saved me.

Yeah, well all I can say is that a half truth is a still a while lie, ain't it ...

As far as young kids go, my primary interest is to get parents to read to their kids. That's about the most you can do, I think.

As a writer, you get to bring attention to something without preaching. I don't believe in being didactic. So if you dramatize something, you automatically bring attention to it if people read it.

I can't stand that - those women in 'Waiting to Exhale' now. I can't stand them. But that's because I'm 53 and not 33. But what they were experiencing at 33, I identified with it.

We get divorce, we get conned, someone we love dies, or we can't find anybody to love us or somebody breaks our heart and we realize this fairy tale ain't fair. So we suffer.

I like gay men who don't hate women, and I don't mind being around rich white people, because there's plenty of them in the Bay Area, and I know how to ignore Republicans.

You promised me you would never cheat on me, that you'd love me forever and we would never get a divorce." "I still love you, and I hate that I cheated on you, and I wish we'd never gotten divorced.

At least be a nice lesbian or you're going to give the rest a bad rap.

People need to be re - sometimes we need to reinvent ourselves and then get reacquainted with our better selves.

It is clear to me right this minute that regret is just a wasted emotion.

Too many of us are hung up on what we don't have, can't have, or won't ever have. We spend too much energy being down, when we could use that same energy – if not less of it – doing, or at least trying to do, some of the things we really want to do.

It takes me forever to say my prayers these days, but I don't care, because this time around, I want to make sure God doesn't have to do any guesswork.

I like doing the readings and the autographing, but the interviewing gets a little tedious because you get asked the same questions every day and sometimes three or four times a day.

Most women are amazing. They just need to be with someone who makes it easy for them to express it. I think it's called respect.

Can't nothing make your life work if you ain't the architect.

They're bored with their boring husbands who are workaholics like my dad. They're bored with their boring lives, sick of us kids and all this puberty and rebelling, so they pop pills all day long and shop and watch the soaps, and then when it all starts to fall apart they realize they just want to be happy again, so they go to rehab to clean up their act and then start fresh. Can you relate?

Sometimes I cheat and buy things I used to make from scratch and just doctor them up.

I pray for my sister. That she be allowed to discover grace and find peace without drugs. That her hair grows. That some of her pain be driven from her and given to me because I think I can handle it. I pray for her kids. That they find they have a chance to grow up knowing they were loved.

I been saying it for years: church is full of sneaky men posing as honest souls, and they are perpetuators our here looking for women just like you, with giant holes in your hearts, and they can smell when you got a good job and when you lonely as hell.

I'm so sorry this had to happen to you. You deserved a chance to live a full life. You were on your way, Joy. And I was rooting for you. I know that Lovey's love wasn't enough to make up for what you carried in your heart. That somebody didn't love you enough to keep you. Or care for you. I can't imagine what you do with that kind of pain. But we tried to show you we cared; even when we were mad, that was the reason. You are the only sister I've had and I just wish we could've gotten closer sooner. I wish I had been more comforting to you.

I'm the only one who can stop me.. I'm the one who's been sitting at the stoplight all these years, waiting for the light to turn green.

Write from your heart, and God will take care of the rest.

My stories are character driven.

The best rush in the world is getting something at 80 percent off.

For five years I didn't think it was possible to be this happy.
But then he forgot all those promises he made. He forgot why he loved me. He simply stopped loving me.

And this is how he did it:
He stopped talking to me unless I spoke to him.
He stopped holding my hand.
He stopped kissing me good night.
He stopped kissing me good morning.
He stopped kissing me.
He stopped smiling at me.
He stopped laughing.
He stopped bathing and showering with me.
He stopped wanting me.
He started swearing at me.
He started lying to me.
He started cheating on me.
He hurt me.
And then he told me he was in love with another woman and wanted a divorce.
Oh, I forgot. He said he was sorry.

I wanted to blow his fucking brains out.

I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots
things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story
readers see an unknotting of sorts. Not what you expect, not the easy answers you get on TV, not wash and wear philosophies, but a reproduction of believable, emotional experiences.

Every human being I know craves love and affection.

Don't worry about how pretty (the story) sounds, how lilting it is, and the imagery, and the metaphor, all that. Most readers don't care. It's the people in your book that matter.

Happiness aint got no Ph.D. or no certain amount of zeroes behind it!

If you jump to conclusions, you make terrible landings.

I let my characters do the talking, simple as that.

I've got tons of irreplaceable information inside the soul of this computer.

Pay attention to the things that agitate you. It will tell you a lot about yourself.

Over the years it became clear that sometimes you fall in love only to realize you don't even like the person.

Parents can ruin children, and sometimes that's a learned behavior. Sometimes you can't blame your parents for it, sometimes you can. I think to me, that's what the whole paradox is, is people that have children that don't even know how to raise them.

Now, I've been known to be attractive on special occasions, and I do my best to project as much beauty as I can muster from deep inside, though I often fail.

You know, one of my fears about living alone so long is that you get used to doing everything your own way.

I was tired of chasing ghosts, hollow men who were outside my comfort zone, men who had nothing to give me except a rush. It was all I asked for, and all I ever got.

Life is like a jigsaw puzzle, you have to see the whole picture, then put it together piece by piece!

Wherever there's a prison, for the most part, especially where there's Black people, it's overcrowded. I don't know who really gets out.

It's amazing how we can make ourselves believe what we want to.

I don't care if he never becomes my boyfriend or my husband, i just want him to be legitimate.

Always listen to the parent who doesn't like who you love. They can smell a mistake. Of course, you don't find this out until you realize that the person you fell in love with is different from the person you married. Some men are good at fooling you.

I just believe that young people need to be able to learn how to write in their own voice. Just like a musician, you pride yourself on having your own distinct sound.

It's sad to think that we've gotten to this that we actually have to think about how to go about finding a man. But what's even sadder is that some men make you feel guilty for looking.

Cruising the Internet doesn't count as writing. Neither does answering e-mail. Before you check Twitter & FB and do other similar tasks that get in the way of writing, write first. (I really need to take my own advice here!)

I take what people feel and think, especially when it's different from, very seriously, and I find it liberating.

I'm a fast writer.

I'd crack up without my music. It's the best company you can have, really. It don't say 'no' or 'maybe,' or ask no questions.