Philip Kerr Quotes

No one can be an artist without a rich inner life.

A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

I've always written about things that cause me to feel something.

I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.

Any man who does not have his inner world to translate is not an artist.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already.

I think you have to know who you are. Get to know the monster that lives in your soul, dive deep into your soul and explore it.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

What's in your soul is in your soul.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

It's a very hard thing for all of us to accept ourselves at all the different stages - the horrible side, the wonderful side, the adorable side - and who you are as a grownup. And then to bring what you learned as a child to that grownup: that is the magic of creativity.

I've always drawn on bits and pieces of my own life.

Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.

I am a writer. I suppose I think that the highest gift that man has is art, and I am audacious enough to think of myself as an artist - that there is both joy and beauty and illumination and communion between people to be achieved through the dissection of personality.

I want people to find their inner depth.

I decided with 'Savage Season' to use a lot of things in my life as the basis.

What we are, the experiences we've had, come to the surface.

I think 'Lost Boy' is more of a metaphor for oneself. When I listen to that song, I don't picture someone else. I kind of wrote it from a very honest place.

Your music essentially reflects everything you do, everything you've been through, in the deepest part of you.

The place you have to start to be any good at this, at acting, is with yourself. Everything is inside of you, all of it - the murderer, the great mother, the therapist, the husband. Everything is inside of us.

I mean, what do you think creativity is? Nothing but self-indulgence. And the more self-indulgent it is, the more interesting it becomes. So I think that part of creativity is also falling in love with your own narcissism: accepting it, using it as an asset.

'Birdman' came from a very beautiful side of me, from a part of honesty and surrender about things.

We're all born storytellers. It's part of the species. But, more specifically, I suppose a particular combination of sensitivity and trauma made me a writer: an essential disquiet with reality, which required exploration through portrayal.