A Quote by Gayl Jones

I learned to write by listening to people talk. I still feel that the best of my writing comes from having heard rather than having read.

Gayl Jones

Quote Topics

Best Feel Having Heard Learned Listening People Rather Read Still Talk Than Write Writing

Quote Author

Gayl Jones
American - Novelist
Born: November 23, 1949

I feel like having details from their day and having a plot and action and things to do is much more revealing than having a character sitting and thinking to themselves. When I'm writing, I want people to actually have a goal, something that's dragging them forward.

Kaui Hart Hemmings

You really should be able to feel the higher power of music and be moved by it, rather than listening to me waffle on and having to explain it.

Maynard James Keenan

I wish I had the luxury of time to read and write like grad students do. That sounds pretty awesome. When I was writing my first book one of my friends was going to grad school at the same time and I heard a lot of stories about drinking, too. I feel like everyone was having affairs.

Jami Attenberg

We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.

Karan Mahajan

Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

It's better to write a pilot rather than write a spec show. In some cases, you have to do both, but more often, writing a pilot and having an original voice is more important.

Cheo Hodari Coker

I can't write about rich people having relationship problems and breaking up in New York. I don't know that world of Terrence McNally. I knew I had to write people who talk the way I talk. And they talked very different than Terrence McNally.

Lucy Alibar

What's depressing, in a way, thinking of Margaret Thatcher legacy - and she was no doubt great in many ways - but the arts in the UK are still having to justify that it is a profitable business rather than a frivolity. It's one of the greatest UK exports, one of the reasons people come to the UK, and yet we're still having to justify our existence in terms of funding.

Gregory Doran

It takes me a long time to write, and I trust myself, so I write very sparsely, so when I do, I know it's good, you know what I mean? Rather than writing a whole bunch and having to sort out what's good and what's not.

Earl Sweatshirt

I hate having to do small talk. I'd rather talk about deep subjects. I'd rather talk about meditation, or the world, or the trees or animals, than small, inane, you know, banter.

Ellen DeGeneres

If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.

Oscar Wilde

I love playing. In lots of ways, I think having been able to carry on playing purely out of love rather than having to do it for a living means I still love the drums. It helps that, if I don't want to play, I don't really have to! I'm not the best drummer in the world, but it's something I love and enjoy, and that sounds like a good trade.

Al Murray

I'm very grateful that anyone takes the time to read what I write, coming from people perceive to be exclusively a musical background and having no traditional schooling in writing.

Davey Havok

Reading and writing music is a wonderful way of getting ideas in your head down to someone else who reads and writes, but if you don't read and write, and the other musician you're playing with are trying to express something who doesn't read and write, than it's a question of "I wrote" so that you must learn from listening and from understanding where that's coming from.

Ronnie Montrose

The more I think about our species the more I think we just do stuff and make up explanations later when asked. But it's not true that I would rather write than read. I would rather read than write. To be honest I would rather hang upside down in a bucket than write.