short-story-writers

"So it is that bird and man, Sun and moon Are born and die in Brahma the Sacred– Where all things become one."

"I would like my readers to levitate when they read the novel. I believe that there is too much violence and coarseness in the world, not just in books, but on television as well. People become degraded when they overuse these things. As I writer, I feel it is my challenge to come up with a phrase that can convey all the anguish a human being feels and to express it in a poetic way. Literature becomes simplistic when two out of every three words are vulgarisms. It requires no effort on the part of the creator or the reader."

"Man is a political animal in certain societies, but it is also an emotional and imaginative animal in any context. Its spirituality is a lot more powerful and omnipresent than politics. My characters might be influenced by political events, but politics isn’t what governs in their lives, but spirituality. A citizen in any Western country could describe themselves as a political animal”; but a druid priest, masai or pygmy in Africa, an indigenous person from the Caribbean in pre-historic times or even the Amazon today, doesn’t follow these parameters. According to these cultures, the spirit and emotions are a lot more important."

"I’m more worried about exploring new subjects and places that give me interesting information, than speculate about what other people can think or say about my work. Life is getting shorter and shorter and I want to make the most of mine."

"In life, reality and fantasy are blended, and I deliberately look for that connection in my work. It gives me pleasure to do so"

"Cuba is a ghost that feeds my literature...The seedling of what I am today took root on that island. But, that Cuba no longer exists, except for in my memories and my generation’s collective imagination. This is why it is a mythical and real land at the same time, which continues to sustain my ideas and dreams."

"Exile was where I was able to complete the amended or mutilated spaces that I was still missing to understand Cuba’s history. My novels, riddled with ghosts, journeys in time, mythological reinterpretations, are how I try to give a coherent image so as to reconstruct that incomplete reality which I was shown."

"It’s as if Ray Bradbury had married Michael Ende and occasionally flirted with Anais Nin.”"

"In my pre-teen years, I read books such as Yoruba Girl Dancing by Simi Bedford, Beka Lamb by Zee Edgell and books by Rosa Guy. I also read a lot of Enid Blyton and Betsy Byars."

"My religion has a great influence on my lifestyle and definitely my work. Coming from a very Islamic background, I see and take the Islamic point of view all the time. I let the Qur’an and Sunnah guide my actions and decisions always."

"I think they must tackle three important sectors: power, refineries and diversify our economy. Then, a systematic eradication of corruption must kick start these three."

"You can read a lot of books and the main characters are white people - especially in the classics - and after a while you forget that you're not white, almost, because it's this big pervasive culture. And then you find books like Yoruba Girl Dancing [by Simi Bedford] and you think: it's just as interesting to be Nigerian in England as it is to be white in England."

"daughter wants to marry at a young age, I would first have the necessary conversations with her and if i know this is what she needs, i will allow her. I won’t allow premarital sex in my house."

"Through Yoruba Girl Dancing, Simi Bedford ingeniously, entertainingly, eloquently, and intelligently examines the complicated issues of home and identity, language and diaspora, in multiple contexts."

"How we danced. The music poured through our veins and we flowed with the beat. The wheel had come full circle. We wound and unwound our bodies seamlessly as if we had no bones. Is there a sight more beautiful, the older women said, than a Yoruba girl dancing?"

"I went to school in England and I was taught about slavery, but I was taught about it from a very European point of view - that this was a horrible episode, but actually, Europeans then realised that it was a terrible thing they were doing and so very kindly, as a gift, gave freedom to the slaves."

"People’s experiences define how they view life. A man who has been through it all, he might want to resort to the village, it’s not so much of a bad idea to catch them young. When you pick a poor girl,a girl from her back ground knowing that her expectations fall in line with what you want.Men who successfully marry from the village, know all she wants and her definition of success will be to give birth and take care of their children"

"“How did he die?” “Firing squad.” The Brigadier-General snorts. “I do not much care for comedies,” he says."

"Real refugees live in real refugee camps. Photo opportunities with celebrities call for movie sets. Army privates, starved for weeks and stuck in the stockade, are conscripted to act like refugees and thereafter either assassinated or promoted, depending on the things that these sorts of things usually depend on."

"Is this dementia, desperation, or Machiavellian mischief? It occurs to me that the course of the world is perhaps set in motion but idiocy so convoluted it is rendered complex."

"Men like me, we are necessary because we unite those we recruit to keep us in power, and we unite those who have been recruited to put different versions of us in power. It is just like Woody Allen says, in a revolution oppressors become oppressed and vice versa."

"Does circumstance reveal character or create it?"

"“People like me,” he says, “are either in power and fighting to stay in power, or we are not in power and fighting to be in power.”"

"Patricia Grace's writing is as delicate as Japanese brushwork, yet as poignant and throat-aching as the loss of a loved one."

"Grace's stories make a shining and enduring place formed of the brilliant weave of Maori oral storytelling and contained within the shape of contemporary Western forms. We are welcomed in, and when we get up to leave, we have been well fed, we have made friends and family, and we are bound to understanding and knowledge of one another."

"When I began to write in the 1970s there were three women I considered my elders: Katerina Mataira, Arapera Blank and Jacquie Sturm. They were like spinners working on a loom and their great triumph, together with that of Hone Tuwhare and Patricia Grace, was to begin spinning the tradition from which all contemporary Maori writers come."

"(What would you say is the main motivating factor that keeps you writing?) PG: I keep wanting to explore, that's probably my main motivation. I want to go where the writing leads me and find out how I'm going to be able to put across what I want to say. I'm looking for new things to do all the time, new ways of reaching out."

"It's as though the pushing outward allows understanding to drop down-as though you've given words, ideas, sometimes conventions, a really good shake. Then you look to see what's happened. (Interviewer: How do you push the edges, as you put it? Do you do it through language?) PG Through using language in some different way, through trying different structures, through experimenting and trying to break the rules."

"I think that with writing, every experience is important; everything that happens around us or near us or inside us, or that is part of ourselves. When people ask me where ideas come from, I say they come from my own background and my own experience. That experience and background includes everything that happens - what people say and do, and how they say and do it. It includes dreams and imaginings, thoughts and hopes, and desires and disappointments."

"Though I had always liked books, any books, any written-down words or expressions, the ones I read as a child were always exotic. I never found myself in a book."

"I had always loved writing, but I didn't kind of know that a writer was something one could aspire to be and that was partly because I'd never read writing by New Zealand writers."

"In many stories blackness was equated with evil: devils, witches’ clothes, unlucky cats, bad wolves. New Zealand history was told from a Eurocentric point of view, if it was told at all."

"I'd had a glossary in a previous work and then I suddenly thought that a glossary is there for foreign languages, italics are there for foreign languages. I didn't want the Māori language to be treated as a foreign language in its own country."

"...the telling was not complete. As the people slept there was one more story to be told, a story not of a beginning or an end, but marking only a position on the spiral. (The Storles, chapter 28 p180)"

"I was okay about being Māori. I was okay about being brown, because this had been reinforced positively by my parents and their families. But I always had it in the back of mind, these people don't understand. They don't know. Along with that there was often the assumption that I wasn't clean, I wasn't clever, you know. These were the things that hurt me."

"At the time I gave the paper (1987), New Zealand history was still being evaluated from a Eurocentric viewpoint. It generally glorified the European settler experience and by doing so negated the Māori experience and settlement of Aotearoa. A look at some of the vocabulary in use could be taken as a quick example. Take “pioneer” and “settler”. These referred to British pioneers and settlers. The ancestors of the Māori children sitting in our classrooms were referred to in many less complimentary terms. They were savage barbarians, hostile, cunning. Warlike. Yet the British with all their guns and armoury, sweeping in on many indigenous areas of the world, were never referred to as warlike. In those times, the wars between Māori and Pākehā were still being referred to as “Māori Wars”. A British fighting force was an army. A Māori fighting force was a war party (a term still in use). British fighters were soldiers or colonial forces. Māori fighters were rebels and raiders and warriors (again, still in use). A successful battle by the colonial forces was a victory, by a Māori fighting force a massacre."

"She told of gifts that she'd been given, and how gifts once given cannot be taken away and do not change. Gifts did not change even though there could be a shifting in the self caused by pain. (The Stories, chapter 28 p174)"

"...the scars will heal as growth returns, because the forest is there always, coiled in the body of the land. (Roimata, chapter 26 p169)"

""People are strength too. Care for people and you are cared for, give strength to people and you are strong. It's land and people that are a person's self, and to give to the land and to give to the people is the best taonga of all. Giving is strength. We've always known it..." (The Stories, chapter 28 p176)"

"Everything we need is here, but for some years we had had little contact with other people as we struggled for our lives and our land. It was good now to know new people and to feel their strength. It was good to have new skills and new ideas, and to listen to all the new stories told by all the people who came. It was good to have others to tell our own stories to, and to have them there sharing our land and our lives. Good had followed what was not good, on the circle of our days. (Toko, chapter 21 p145)"

"although the stories all had different voices, and came from different times and places and understandings, though some were shown, enacted or written rather than told, each one was like a puzzle piece which tongued or grooved neatly to another. And this train of stories defined our lives, curving out from points on the spiral in ever-widening circles from which neither beginnings nor endings could be defined. (Roimata, chapter 5 p41)"

"...gifts are legacies, that once given cannot be taken away. They may pass from hand to hand, but once held they are always yours. The gift we were given is with us still. (Roimata, chapter 25 p159)"

"The old woman sang of a time gone ahead, and of those already walking ahead of her on the pathways. Her eyes were reddened as though they bled. And her songs, like the pathways, were interweavings of times and places and of all that breathed between earth and sky. And the pathways and the songs went into a time beyond the thumbing down of the eyelids. (The Stories, chapter 28 p180)"

"If there are no books which tell us about ourselves, but tell us only about others, that makes you invisible in the world of literature. That is dangerous. If there are books and stories about you but they are ones belonging only to the past, it is as though you do not belong in present society. That is dangerous. If there are books about you but they are negative, demeaning, insensitive and untrue, that is dangerous. Multiply this by what appears on television, in advertising, teacher attitudes, health services, questionnaires, testing and examinations and in many areas of society, maybe we shouldn’t wonder at the low self-esteem, low self-confidence, and therefore the disengagement of many Māori children with education."

"there's singing in the mountains, laughter in the trees, dancing in the light of evening fires. There's whispering in hearts and minds and shadows. That's enough for me. (chapter 31 p238)"

"Salt cures. Sea washes. It cleans. Expanse enlivens the spirit, frees the mind."

"Only [he] could secure me, he being as rooted to the earth as a tree is. Only he could free me from raging forever between earth and sky - which is a predicament of great loneliness and loss. (Roimata, chapter 3 p23)"

"I had other stories too, known stories from before life and death and remembering, from before the time of the woman lonely in the moon. Given stories. But before life and death and remembering' is only what I had always thought. It was a new discovery to find that these stories were, after all, about our own lives, were not distant, that there was no past or future, that all time is a now-time, centred in the being. It was a new realisation that the centred being in this now-time simply reaches out in any direction towards the outer circles, these outer circles being named 'past' and 'future' only for our convenience. The being reaches out to grasp those adornments that become part of the self. So the 'now' is a giving and a receiving between the inner and the outer reaches, but the enormous difficulty is to achieve refinement in reciprocity, because the wheel, the spiral, is balanced so exquisitely. These are the things I came to realise as we told and retold our own-centre stories. (Roimata, chapter 5 p39)"

"The shore is a place without seed, without nourishment, a scavenged death place. It is the wasteland, too salt for growth, where the sea puts up its dead. Shored seaweed does not take root but dries and piles, its pods splitting in the sun, while bleached land plants crack and turn to bone. Yet because of being a nothing, a neutral place - not land, not sea - there is freedom on the shore, and rest. There is freedom to search the nothing, the weed pile, the old wood, the empty shell, the fish skull, searching for the speck, the beginning - or the end that is the beginning. Hope and desire can rest there, thoughts and feelings can shift with sand grains being sifted by the water and the wind. I put my bag down there one evening and rested, leaving a way for the nothing, the nothing that can become a pin-prick, a stirring. I took warm clothing from my bag and waited through the night for the morning that would become a new beginning. (Roimata, chapter 1 p18)"

"Dear Rimini and Benedict, You didn't deserve ill-humour and rebuff, and I had no right to send you off with empty hearts when all you were asking was to get to know your 'father'. 'Father' is what you said. You probably think I'm still a bit loony. It's probably true. After you'd gone I kept thinking about my war notebooks. Everything I could tell you, more than I could ever tell you about your 'father', is contained in them."