A Quote by Uwem Akpan

I always felt my writing could benefit from the attention of established writers. I knew my work could grow and be better. — © Uwem Akpan
I always felt my writing could benefit from the attention of established writers. I knew my work could grow and be better.
I never felt good enough about myself. I could be better at this, I could be better at that. I could look better. My work could be better. That whole idea that you're going to get caught, you're going to be found out as a fraud. That's one of those reasons I got up at 2:30 in the morning.
I knew I wasn't that good a writer, and all I could remember was that I could draw. I'm better at drawing than I am at writing.
There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men - many men - unfortunately aren't anything.
Working as a journalist, I was always tempted to lie. I felt I could do dialogue better than the person I was interviewing. I felt I could lie better than Nixon and be more concise than some random person I was covering.
When I saw the original versions of 'Virasat' and 'Gardish,' I felt the content was so good but that they had shot the films very badly. I knew that if I could get such content, I could shoot it much better. That was what I did.
You always believed that as good as you knew you were, there was always somebody who could take your place. I tried to work as hard as I could to make sure that didn't happen.
We wanted to bring attention to the fact that we had so many deals taking place that we could have made change for the better for all people, and we felt that we would be a catalyst to bring this to attention to society.
When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.
I've always known that I've wanted to write, but I always saw myself doing that in the context of something other than film, so it was a really beautiful and kind of perfect moment in my life when I realized that I could combine this idea of wanting to write and tell my own stories with the environment I had grown up in and knew well - that I could make film as opposed to writing being a departure from what I knew.
I don't play basketball for the money. I don't play it for the crowd. When I didn't have a friend, when I was lonely, I always knew I could grab that orange pill and go hoop. I could go and dunk on somebody. If things weren't going right, I could make a basket and feel better.
I always felt like I could participate at the adult table, but I also knew that if you're going to make an argument about something, you better have something good to say.
I always felt that I hadn't achieved what I wanted to achieve. I always felt I could get better. That's the whole incentive.
I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me. Alice Munro, I felt that way about from an early time. Grace Paley.
I know when I left the game, I could have played more. There is no question. I think I could have played at a very high level, too. But I could not play the way everyone wanted me to play. And I was not willing to compromise what I felt was a standard that I had established in this league and, particularly, for our fans at home.
When I was a kid, I felt like I could do anything and play anything. I just felt super-confident. And then, once I started to play music professionally, maybe it's from being from a small town, but you grow up and then you're suddenly a big fish in a small pond, and I realized that there were a billion other drummers out there that could play as good as you or better, and everybody wants that job.
...I should have people around bugging me and getting under my skin because without people I could not grow - I could not grow in God, and I could not grow as a human.
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