May 28, 2014 / Inspiration

“When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am.”

We’ve lost Maya Angelou the person, but not the beauty and wisdom she pinned down with words. If you need inspiration today, let her descriptions of the writing life lift you up.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin — find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that it was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we’re capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I’m trying for that.

But I’m also trying for the language. I’m trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for what it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.

I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.

Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool — and I’m not any of those — to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do — that’s what I mean to do.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind. I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it.

 If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.

The best candy shop a child can be left alone in is the library.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans — because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone — because we have the impulse to explain who we are. Not just how tall we are, or thin… but who we are internally… perhaps even spiritually. There’s something, which impels us to show our inner-souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.

Learn more about Dr. Angelou’s remarkable life in the New York Times, or see how other bloggers are remembering her in the Maya Angelou topic in the Reader — we particularly love these pieces from Black Millennial Musings and All at once….

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  2. Those quotes are beautiful! Thank you for this post. I especially liked the one in which she said she’s trying to find out who she is while writing. It’s exactly how I feel. Writing often seems to me like making my inner voice be heard, pouring out things I had not been able to put into words and actually say before. And a lot of times when I write, I stop and think about the words I had just put down and realize “wow, that’s true” and I’ve come to know and understand myself a little better without trying to, it just happens.

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  7. I am both so thankful for this woman’s life and words and devastated at her loss today. RIP beautiful woman, beautiful soul, beautiful words, beautiful love; beautiful.

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  9. I am a Vietnamese college students and I am deeply affected by the beautiful words and saying from Maya Angelou. Thank you for being our motivation and impulse.

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  11. I like the title of this post. Because, sometimes I feel it too, writing is like we find out who am I. And really, for me, I can explore everything of my feeling by words. Good

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  14. Thank you Maya, those are inspiring words. I am a painter, not a good writer, thus I would add that we paint and write not only to explain ourself, but also to explain how we see others and things around us.

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  29. She will remembered, you not even less too: for you let her flow of words continue and spread the lightness over dark. You, both, inspire me to write!

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