A Quote by Sigrid Nunez
When I was a kid and wanted to grow up to be a writer, I assumed I would be writing about animals and children because that's what I cared about and read about. But I never did.
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I didn't write with a target audience in mind. What excited me was how much I would enjoy writing about Harry. I never thought about writing for children - children's books chose me. I think if it is a good book anyone will read it.
I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it.
An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.
I had to fight hard against loneliness, abuse, and the knowledge that any mistakes I made would be magnified because I was the only black man out there... I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.
If I have children, I am never going to read them stories about finding Prince Charming because they will grow up feeling disappointed.
A real good artist is basically a grown-up kid, who never kills the kid. What we call being an adult is basically about killing the kid. People think you have to forget about the kid to become an adult and deal with grown-up problems. But, that's bullshit. We are still kids. It's the same, you just grow up. You're a kid with more experience.
Even in this case, whatever it is, it's about [Barack] Obama. "How did Obama do at the memorial? Did Obama come off well? Will Obama's poll numbers go up? Did he really reach people?" The hell that there are 53 people dead. Nobody cares about them, like nobody cared about the four dead in Benghazi. All the media cared about, how did Obama do?
I do find it easy to write songs about heartbreak; it comes really naturally to me. It was a little bit more difficult for me to break my mould and tackle different subjects. You know what it's like because you're a writer. You don't want to tread on the same territory. Writing about the personal stuff was a little difficult because I'd worry about who would read it and who would be offended by it.
I wish that the adults who are 'in power' cared more about what their children read. Books are incredibly powerful when we are young - the books I read as a child have stayed with me my entire life - and yet, the people who write about books, for the most part, completely ignore children's literature.
I also wanted my basketball players to know that I really cared about them. Forget basketball; as a person, I cared, I cared about their family.
For me writing is a long, hard, painful process, but it is addictive, a pleasure that I seek out actively. My advice to young writers is this: Read a lot. Read to find out what past writers have done. Then write about what you know. Write about your school, your class, about your teachers, your family. That's what I did. Each writer must find his or her own kind of voice. Finally, you have to keep on writing.
I came up around people who took acting seriously, who cared about acting, cared about the theater and, in the '70s, made movies that said something that mattered. I came up with those people, and I was a kid. Their ethos and credo became mine.
I remember thinking Democrats and liberals were the good guys. They cared about the little guy. They cared about poor people. They cared about minorities.
I never thought about being a writer as I grew up. A writer wasn't something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.
I'm a writer. I should be allowed to speak about my writing at times. And I'm really excited to speak about that. There's nothing I am shameful of or anything else in my novels. They are my children and I'm happy to speak about my children.
I wanted to be a director first to protect my writing. I'm a playwright and you don't need to protect your writing when you're in the theater because everyone's there to protect the writing. When I had an idea for a film that I really cared about as my own, I wanted to direct it, and then I immediately became interested in directing in and of itself because it's such a deep art. You suddenly have all these tools at your disposal to tell the story.
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