Bow to the monster of your own imagination -- Quotation by Famous Author (b. 1908)

from "Writer's Almanac" (American Public Media: Garrison Keillor):

September 4 is the birthday of the man who said, "The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination." That's writer Richard Wright, born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi (1908). He's the author of Black Boy (1945), White Man, Listen! (1957), and American Hunger (1997), as well as a number of short stories and a volume of haiku.
But he's best known for his novel Native Son (1940), about a black man named Bigger Thomas who gets a job as a chauffeur for beautiful young white woman and accidentally kills her. Native Son was a huge best-seller when it came out, and was soon afterward made into a Broadway musical. It's now required reading at many high schools across the country.

Richard Wright said, "I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all."