Jamaica Writer Quotes

I tend to have really interested conversations with employers. They enjoy my interviews and they always last a little longer than norm for i have so much to say and as one said, i am but a breath of fresh air.
I was asked what motivates me?
I told them my children.
When i was a child, i wanted to be like Oprah.
I want to be the kind of person my children will be aspire to be.
I want my daughter to say she wants to be like me. ~ Crystal Evans

I am yet to find one reliable friend in this crowd of shifting strangers. I have no true friends only mimicries, users and loopers. People popping in and out, keeping tabs on my life, not adding much credence to my existence yet not abandoning my life entirely because they know that greatness lies beyond the layers of this muck. It is up to me to discover those who are worth taking on this journey towards my destiny and the ones who will only get in my way. ~ Crystal Evans

I grew up. I began to think the United States had some problems that really required the help of artistic people to solve. And I gave myself permission to be a writer instead of a civil servant. ~ Wallace Shawn

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything ... It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus. ~ Enid Bagnold

Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander. ~ Karl Rove

If we want to

We will become a people, if we want to, when we learn that we are not angels, and that evil is not the prerogative of others
We will become a people when we stop reciting a prayer of thanksgiving to the sacred nation every time a poor man finds something to eat for his dinner
We will become a people when we can sniff out the sultan's gatekeeper and the sultan without a trial
We will become a people when a poet writes an erotic description of a dancer's belly
We will become a people when we forget what the tribe tells us, when the individual recognizes the importance of small details
We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying: 'Our country is loftier and more beautiful!'
We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute from being beaten up in the streets
We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba
We will become a people, if we want to, when the singer is allowed to chant a verse of Surat al-Rahman at a mixed wedding reception
We will become a people when we respect the right, and the wrong. ~ Mahmoud Darwish

Many people have compared me to the Victorian adventure writer, Rider Haggard. I accept that as a compliment. As a boy growing up in Central Africa I read all Haggard's African novels. ~ Wilbur Smith

Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy. ~ Irwin Shaw

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of. ~ Anne Lamott

A true writer cuts their heart open and lets it bleed all over the page...
~Cynthia Batten ~ Cynthia Batten

To be quite honest, along with thinking and such when it comes to writing, I'm not into words like "theory." I'm a PhD dropout. No matter how many twenty-five-page papers I wrote, I never felt like I was saying much. I didn't feel like the writer of the book, whose work I was analyzing, would have been impressed. It didn't matter how much time or effort I put in. ~ Mary J. Miller

Write. If you've always dreamed of being a writer, write. Even if you think what you write is crap, write. You might be surprised by what happens! ~ Stephen Woods

I don't sit around waiting for passion to strike me. I keep working steadily, because I believe it is our privilege as humans to keep making things. Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

When a writer with a voice as good as Richard Christian Matheson's tells you something, you have no choice but to listen. In THE RITUAL OF ILLUSION the voices are legion, and the gaps between their testimonies drag us closer to understanding the darkly beating heart of all our, ephemeral, transfixing dreams. Dark, subtle, horrifically funny. ~ Michael Marshall Smith

The measure of a great writer is not how many weeks his books spend on the best-seller lists, but how many years his books remain in print after his death. ~ Cal Thomas

Come back, come back, back to Jamaica
Don't you know we made a big mistaika
We would be so sad if you told us goodbye
And we promise not to shoot you out of the sky! ~ Jimmy Buffett

Unfortunately, many people suffer from BPS - Blank Page Syndrome. Let's face it: starting to write is scary. Seeing the cursor blinking at you on that bright white screen, realizing that you now have to come up with three or ten or twenty pages of text all on your own - it's enough to give anyone a major case of writer's block! ~ Stefanie Weisman

Never mind the transience of show business and popularity. When we hear Ray Charles, we go, 'That's a great singer.' You don't need a reporter or a writer to tell us. Good is good and it should shine through the years. ~ Art Garfunkel

There's a powerful magic about being a writer that I still marvel at. ~ Sidney Lumet

I've translated two of Bae's novels, A Greater Music and Recitation, which are coming from Open Letter and Deep Vellum in October and January respectively. A Greater Music is a semi-autobiographical book centred on a Korean writer moving to Berlin, learning to live and even write in a foreign language. ~ Deborah Smith

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer. ~ Neil Gaiman

Whether it means producing a piece of art, writing a short story, or simply bringing beauty into our home or into the lives of others, consider for a moment that we each have the capacity to be creative. The masterpiece, then, is not something we create to hang on our wall but something in ourselves as we fulfill our God-given potential, utilizing the talents He gave us. ~ Mary Potter Kenyon

When reading a book, you are sold what some writer thought. When reading a newspaper, you are sold what someone did, and, what some advertiser made. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I don't think I'd call myself a war writer, but I would probably say I'm a writer who has written about war. ~ Tim O'Brien

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax. ~ Alfred Kazin

A runner's high doesn't come from thinking about the end result, only of the moment, one step, one breath, one heartbeat at a time. It's the same for a writer ... ~ C.J. Heck

What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I'm not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up. ~ Cyril Connolly

I love memoirs, particularly obscure ones because the writer is usually a regular guy just telling what happened to him and to his friends. What these tales lack in artfulness they make up for in passion and authenticity. For a writer of fiction, they are solid gold. I have stolen so much from memoirs it's ridiculous. ~ Steven Pressfield

There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets ... when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through. ~ Charles Bukowski

Being a writer means expressing with passion your imagination, nightmares, dreams, experiences and reality through words on paper. You are a successful writer when readers criticize, get emotionally affected by, and praise your written work. As a writer, rejections are paths to success. Being prepared for it is like wearing a powerful armor in battles unknown. Continue to write. It is a writer's mighty shield and weapon. ~ Sonnia Kemmer

Zombie books were going to be my passion projects, but certainly not pay the bills. I thought I was going to have to get a real job on a sitcom or something, and have my zombie books to remind myself I was still a writer at heart. I never thought I could actually pay my bills and write what I wanted. ~ Max Brooks

I've read some of Kurt Vonnegut letters from when he was young. He was a prisoner of war, and even when he was in his early twenties, there were things mentioned that showed up in his novels. One of the sweetest things in those letters was him wanting to be a writer but doubting himself, not having confidence in himself. ~ Susan Sarandon

Beneath all the chatter and the liturgy runs a fierce nostalgia for the literary myths of the past, for the gigantic figures of Dickens and Joyce, Hemingway and Faulkner. A writer can't even aim at that kind of aura today. But it's that yearning for imagined greatness that drives the whole literary enterprise. Plus the publishers' desperation to manufacture a bestseller to pay the bills. The idea of greatness is a marketing tool. See Franzen. ~ Tim Parks

A singer can quit once he or she has made ten great songs; a director can finish once he or she has made five amazing films; a writer just needs to write three great books. ~ Alber Elbaz

I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The future depicted in a good SF story ought to be in fact possible, or at least plausible. That means that the writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true ... and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you. ~ Frederik Pohl

while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one. I ~ Stephen King

And yes, again, that was it exactly. A retyper and not a writer. A prodigy and not a genius. ~ John Green

It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering. ~ Thomas Perry

He was baffled by Hemingway, felt amibvalent about Fitzgerald, loved Twain and though we should have a national writer like him. I loved and admired Twain but thought all writers were national writers and that there was no such thing as a National Writer. ~ Azar Nafisi

Check out my interview with Kostya Kennedy on themodern online. Sports Illustrated writer and author of Pete Rose: An American Dilemma. It may change your mind, one way or the other. ~ Kostya Kennedy

To unlock the writer's block is to keep writing until you can unknot the "not". If you cannot, then put a can in the plot and unwrap it a lot! ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself. ~ Martin Cruz Smith

If a writer manages to be fascinating about his own novels, then there are only two possibilities: either he is merely voicing out loud what he wrote in his book, and he is a parrot; or he is explaining interesting things that he didn't discuss in his book, in which case the book in question is a failure since it does not live up to its claims. ~ Amelie Nothomb

Q: When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
A: I hate this question, because the answer makes me look like a jerk. The answer exposes me as a jerk. But here it is: the first time I read Twilight, I thought to myself, "If this chick can write a book, then you can!"
One day, Stephanie Meyer is going to give me a bloody nose. I accept that like I accept that I will one day get wrinkles.
To Stephanie Meyer: Could you come at me from the right side?
That side of my face could use adjusting ... ~ Anna Banks

I'm the wave pushed by the wind, always receding before reaching the shore. ~ H.U.