A Quote by Buchi Emecheta

I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger.
I have so much going on inside my head in terms of writing, there's such a large space in my life taken up by that. I can't imagine it being taken up by a husband and children and writing, and everything getting its due. I don't believe there is room for all of it. I really don't.
We grew up with all the Fat Wreck Records and all the Epitaph bands, that era. We mixed it up together. We were never purists of being just pop or just pop-punk. We always wanted to blend everything that we love.
When you're younger and a little more innocent, you write whatever [lyrics] comes naturally. But as you get used to writing you try to steer the sound and music to different music and throwing in the "kitchen sink" of sorts into the music. With that way, you end up putting in much more than before and you could even make much more next time around.
[On growing up in a large family with little money:] ... to take a bath ... we just had a pan of water and we'd wash down as far as possible, and we'd wash up as far as possible. Then, when somebody'd clear the room, we'd wash possible.
I'm always loath to make generalizations about what is for children and what isn't. Certainly children's literature as a genre has some restrictions, so certain things will never pop up in a Snicket book. But I didn't know anything about writing for children when I started - this is the theme of naïveté creeping up on us once more - and I sort of still don't, and I'm happy that adults are reading them as well as children.
Clothing sizes are weird, they go: small, medium, large and then extra large, extra extra large, extra extra extra large. Something happened at large, they just gave up. They were like, 'I'm not doing any more adjectives; you just keep putting extras on there.' We could do better than that: small, medium, large, whoa, easy, slow down, stop it, interesting, American.
Everything always looked better in black and white. Everything always looked as if it were the first time; there's always more people in a black and white photograph. It just makes it seem that there were more people at a gig, more people at a football match, than with colour photography. Everything looks more exciting.
Everything that we put into our bodies should also be of nature, a part of that cycle of nature. Once you start messing with that - as I said, everything is connected. Once you start messing with psychological well-being, we get more and more messed up.
I'm 44 now; I feel better than I did when I was 34. I've got more clarity now. I wake up in the morning, and I write my blog, and then I go upstairs, and I work on music. And I do that every day. That's what I do. I don't check in once a week and think, "Oh, I've gotta come up with something now." I'm always writing. I was just in a coffee shop in Chelsea last night, just killing time, waiting for a friend, and I sat and wrote enough for three good songs. I love it. This is my life. It's all I do.
I'm OK with messing up sometimes and not getting everything perfect - and there's something really relatable there for people that aren't so seasoned in the kitchen.
When I was younger, I dreaded having to write. I would find every possible excuse not to sit down at the typewriter (this was a long time ago). As I've gotten older, I've learned to enjoy putting sentences together, though I still believe that writing, unlike sex, is always better after you're through.
Right now I think I'm the smartest I've ever been. I'm doing everything great now and everything perfect. Like with this taxes stuff. I'm getting better at that. I'm making sure everything is a write-off. Every single thing.
In doing everything, from coming up with the ideas and putting them on paper till doing the final edits, you are always thinking the next three steps, you're always thinking what next, what next, what next?
Don't forget to celebrate. When I was first coming up, everything was so serious - we were always rushing to get to the next thing - that we didn't take the time to say, 'Man, look what we did just now.'
Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.
One thing I'd do was put a great writer's book beside the typewriter and... type out a beautiful and moving paragraph... and see those sentences rising up... and... think, 'Someday maybe I can write like that....' It was like a dream of possibilities for my own self. And maybe I began to know that there was no other way for the sentence... to... arouse the same feeling. The someone writing whose words were rising from the typewriter became like a mentor for me.... You shouldn't do it more than a few times because you must get on with your own work.
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