When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day β but by the minute.
Iris ChangRead
Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.
Interpretation
What this quote means
A writer's primary responsibility is to create works that satisfy their own creative desires rather than cater to external expectations.
Iris Chang emphasizes that the essence of writing lies in self-fulfillment. By prioritizing personal satisfaction, writers can authentically express themselves, which ultimately leads to more genuine and impactful work. This perspective encourages writers to remain true to their own voice and not succumb to the pressures of pleasing others, maintaining artistic integrity in their craft.
Themes
WritingAuthenticitySelf-ExpressionCreativityArtistic Integrity
In practice
Example use cases
In a writing workshop, to encourage participants to embrace their personal style.
More from Iris Chang
All quotes βThe spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.
Iris ChangRead
For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.
Iris ChangRead
Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it's hard to find out when one slides into another.
Iris ChangRead
Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances.
Iris ChangRead
Similar quotes
I'm not a lawyer, but I do know this: we need to protect our ability to tell controversial stories.
Robert RedfordRead
I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.
Edmund WhiteRead
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Salman RushdieRead
But let me see thee stoop from heaven on wings That fill the sky with silver glitterings!
John KeatsRead
Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth.
Ingmar BergmanRead
One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.
J. R. R. TolkienRead