Laurie Halse Anderson Quotes

The experience of reading a book is always unique. I believe that you render a version of the story, when you read a book, in a way that is unique and special to each person who reads it.

I think people will discover themselves in 'Ankahee.'

It's up to the reader to decipher the code, or the words, based on everything they know about life and emotions.

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

I want my readers to find their own way.

Great storytellers in the past would go to an unknown land and return to tell the stories they've found. Those were also journeys into their inner psyches and that's still true today. An actor, a writer, does that as if saying, 'Here's what I've discovered about myself and about the world I'm in. I would like to share this with you.'

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

I have quite a rich inner life, and I'm constantly looking for a way to express that. I haven't found it yet in acting. When you're playing a character, you're only going to find outlets for very specific parts of your inner world.

Acting is a very personal process. It has to do with expressing your own personality, and discovering the character you're playing through your own experience - so we're all different.

I know my lyrics might be weird to some, but they're not like that to me because I know where they come from - I know the secret.

All my characters are me, in one way or another.

Everyone and everything that shows up in our life is a reflection of something that is happening inside of us.

I'm actually beginning to believe that there is something in common among all of my characters. I'm not sure what it is exactly. But I guess that something is me.

Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon... what it means to you.

When you play characters, you shouldn't just be putting on their characteristics - you should be finding it inside yourself.

You can listen to 'Cosmic' and truly get to know me, which I think is special.

I'm trying to look into each character and try to realize her as someone who is also me.

It's not all the time, but you get a sense when you're reading something that it's no longer about boxing or the performance. It's personal.

Ultimately, I don't think you can be a character who's completely alien or divorced from your own personality. It's probably true of every writer - it's probably true of every filmmaker, every songwriter - that, ultimately, every character you create is a facet of yourself.

All of my plays are deeply autobiographical. But it's not straight autobiography.

I really like people to be able to interpret stuff in their own way, I like the ambiguity of the medium. We're just four guys in a band trying to articulate things in a questioning way. Who are we to tell people what to think?

It's very important to me that every person takes away their own meaning from a song, and it's why I don't always love spelling out what a song is about for somebody.

All of my characters, I feel, have some essence of who I am in them.

Spirituality is not about looking up or down - it's about looking inward.