Sufjan Stevens Quotes

I think other people's interpretations of what I've written are a lot better than what I have, because I don't understand a lot of what I write.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction.

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I'm enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

I've always thought that the balance between the side of my mind that knows what it is doing and the side that really hasn't got a clue has to be carefully maintained because if you write too knowingly then you get chilly, and if you write too unknowingly you write bollocks that nobody else can understand.

When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.

I study myself. I study film, and I make sure that everything's on point.

I'm not really going to defend anyone's lyrics.

Writing dark poetry was always my escape.

I like landscape, I guess. It's kind of a game to see how you can describe it.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

I use a lot of similes and metaphors when I work, simply because it's my best way of describing a building or a scene. I'm terrible at describing landscapes - trees, buildings. The inanimate things don't interest me: I always think, "Oh, no, here comes another building I have to describe." So I usually use a simile or metaphor.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

A sound waiting to be a word.

A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.

Some people are able to not only entertain the public in any way that they can but also in some way to throw in some sort of inspirational message with the entertainment. I have always tried to do that with whatever I wrote. And I'm sure that a lot of other writers do, too.