I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, 'That's a pretty little thing,' after I had finished a picture.
Use your notebook to breathe in the world around you.
You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.
When students write from experience, they can breathe those specifics into their writing- dialect, odd smells, precise names of plants- that can animate even the most tired and tedious text.
It's misleading to think of writers as special creatures, word sorcerers who possess some sort of magical knowledge hidden from everyone else. Writers are ordinary people who like to write. They feel the urge to write, and they scratch that itch every chance they get.
Here's the secret of writing: there is no secret.
When someone you love dies, you get a big bowl of sadness put down in front of you, steaming hot. You can start eating now, or you can let it cool and eat it bit by bit later one. Either way, you end up eating the whole thing. There's really no way around it.
You gonna hear a lot of loving songs in there, you gonna hear betrayal songs, you gonna hear action that takes place on some of the records. . . But it all revolves around that world, that Shaolin Wu-Tang world. They just battling one another, and at the end of the day, we all come to find out that we're one and the same. We fighting each other but we're the same.
As your reputation gets bigger, the gaps and chances to go through them get smaller.
I think it's my personality to overcome things, learn from them and become stronger, both personally and professionally. To be honest, I welcome those hardships.
To try to make men equal by altering social arrangements is like trying to make the cards of equal value by shuffling the pack.