I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.
“I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.”
— Taiye Selasi · Essays
The World Motivation
I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.
“I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.”
— Taiye Selasi · Essays
Explore more quotes by Taiye Selasi on topics like Essays, wisdom, and life lessons.
“I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.”
“When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.”
“I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create!”
“So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.”
“That's what makes writer's block so painful. You think the well has run dry, maybe somewhere in the heavens the tap has been turned off. That's beyond frightening.”
“As a young woman, I had been seeking experience, knowledge, truth, the stuff writers need in their work, but when the artist actually kicked in, I came to understand that in this romantic relationship I was not free to be myself, or to find myself, in order to begin the true work I needed to do.”
“I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.”
“When you go back and look at what people say about my essays, they're always going, 'What is this?' Because they're not exactly like other people's essays... The approach is not at all the recognized approach of a non-fiction writer. It's not linear. It isn't pyramidally based on fact.”
“My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha'am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha'am's essays.”
“Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.”
“People aren't coming to me looking for political essays or polemic - they're looking for a rattling good story.”
“When I was at university, I did essays on political theatre. And it was really frustrating that the ideas weren't reaching the people they were talking about. Standup is the one place where you are talking to every level of society.”