Mitski Quotes

I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.

I think writers, by nature, are more observers instead of participators.

I was always such a people-watcher. I would sit on street corners alone and watch people and make up stories about them in my head. Then, all of a sudden, I was the one being watched.

I was always an outsider, always standing outside, observing and trying to figure things out. Which is exactly what you need to do as a writer, I suppose.

My natural state is an outsider, and no matter what group I'm in or where I am, I've always felt like I'm outside the group, and I've always been analyzing the group.

The writer is a person who is standing apart, like the cheese in 'The Farmer in the Dell' standing there alone but deciding to take a few notes. You’re outside, but you can see things up close through your binoculars. Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others.

I was painfully shy, and I had tremendous difficulty making friends. So, lacking friends, I watched other people. Watching is something all writers must do, and it was in junior high that I learned to do it.

When I play games, I'll make up little stories for just anything. It's almost the game of making up background stories for people you see on the street. You know what I mean? I wasn't exactly the popular kid in school growing up, so I found myself really observing people, and watching how they interact, and how they react to things.

I have spent a lot of years on the outside looking in.

A good writer is always a people watcher.

All the things worth writing about are outside me. I'm a lens, not a source. And even if it's not always a comfortable journey, it's always a stimulating one.

Also, I think having that comic gene kind of makes you look at things in a different way. If you take yourself so seriously, eventually you end up one of those people having a 'Do Not Disturb' sign on their lives. You see them drawing the curtains and they don't even realize that they've kind of drifted off somewhere.

You can't be a great comedian without having self-awareness about others or your own faults. You need a strong sense of self and view on the world. That's what great actors have, too.

Every writer is an outsider.

As a writer, I'm mostly at my desk, staring out my window. No one sees me.

When I write, it's like choosing which shoes I'm going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal - but I sometimes have to put myself in other people's shoes.

But I was a sensitive kid. A funny kid, and a perceptive one. There was a lot of time spent alone.

Can you step back from your own mind and thus understand all things?

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel. I feel that it is healthier to look out at the world through a window than through a mirror. Otherwise, all you see is yourself and whatever is behind you.

The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.

You have to be an outsider to write.

My natural state is an outsider. I've always felt outside the group, and I've always been analyzing the group.

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.