A Quote by Mildred D. Taylor
I do not know how old I was when the daydreams became more than that, and I decided to write them down, but by the time I entered high school, I was confident that I would one day be a writer.
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If you're going to be a writer you should sit down and write in the morning, and keep it up all day, every day. Charles Bukowski, no matter how drunk he got the night before or no matter how hungover he was, the next morning he was at his typewriter. Every morning. Holidays, too. He'd have a bottle of whiskey with him to wake up with, and that's what he believed. That's the way you became a writer: by writing. When you weren't writing, you weren't a writer.
One day I decided I was a star and I would walk to school with my head held high. I would walk to school in my stilettos and high heels, listening to 'Lucky' by Britney Spears.
If you want to be a writer, all you need is a piece of paper and a pencil, and I had a manual typewriter. It doesn't cost money to write. It costs money to make art. So I would just write. I would hand out stories in the classes in high school. And the teacher would say, "Whatever you do, don't become a writer."
I wanted to be a filmmaker, actually, when I was in high school and college. But I just decided it would be more expensive to do, so I sort of decided music would be more fun.
I actually only went to high school for six weeks. I lost sleep deciding on what I would wear the next day or who I had to impress. I was just a much more down-to-earth, relaxed person once I decided not to care what people thought of me.
You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.
I don't know about living on an automatic pilot, but I've had times where I've decided to just test myself and my mettle, and for no good reason other than it's what life is. Even before I was acting, I had, like, one day in high school I decided to just show them my pajamas, just for no good reason.
As I get older I find myself thinking about stories more and more before I work so that by the time I eventually sit down to write them, I know more or less how it's going to look, start or feel. Once I do actually set pencil to paper, though, everything changes and I end up erasing, redrawing and rewriting more than I keep. Once a picture is on the page I think of about ten things that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Then when I think of the strip at other odd times during the day, it's a completely different thing than it was before I started.
I actually started out as a poet in high school. I published in small literary magazines for probably about ten years. I entered the Yale Younger Poet contest every year, until I was too old to be a younger poet, and I never got more than a form rejection letter from them.
In sixth grade, I went to a very good private school, and I did learn there. I learned how to read and write. If I had quit school in sixth grade, I would know as much as I know today and would have made one more movie. By the time I got to college, I was so bored and angry.
David Blunkett and I both take the same view that it is scandalous that someone from North Tyneside, Laura Spence, with the best qualifications and who wants to be a doctor, should be turned down by Oxford University using an interview system more reminiscent of the old school network and the old school tie than justice. It is about time for an end to that old Britain where what matters more are the privileges you are born with, rather than the potential you actually have.
Part of my problem as a young writer was that I was too much a New Yorker, always second-guessing the 'market.' I became so discouraged that I decided to write something that would please me alone - that became my sole criterion. And that was when I wrote 'Forgetting Elena,' the first novel I got published.
I would write 100 jokes a day. Most of them were terrible. But I just said, 'I'll write more than everybody else, and that's how I'll get better.'
I've been writing since I'm five years old. I've been writing books since high school - junior high, high school. I write every single day. I never thought I'd be published.
Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.
I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read 'Crime and Punishment,' and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a writer, 'cause it was the first time that I hadn't just entered a book, but a book had entered me.
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