Patricia MacLachlan Quotes

The story of 'Lasers' is my story. I didn't have to look too far to get subject matter for this record; it was stuff that was happening to me.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

Like most writers, I write about what has happened to me as that involves the minimum amount of research.

Actually, that's one of the things I was thinking about writing a story about me, loosely based or autobiographical. I just don't want to be like some people that are in their twenties and writing autobiographies.

As a writer, I wouldn't know how to not take things out of my life.

I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.

There are autobiographical elements to the albums, and when I write, I always reference my own life as well as other things, so I'm just like any novelist or any fiction writer who tells stories.

I was portraying the family through my eyes. Everything that's happened in the strip has happened to me.

In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.

I like to tell stories in my writing but I definitely use my own life experiences to tell that story.

You write an autobiography because you want to tell people how you felt about a certain matter at that time.

I tend to write from a personal place, and most of the time when I'm writing by myself, it's coming from something I've experienced.

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

I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Most things I go through I have to write about.

I never like to put myself in the stories; in 'Lost in the City,' there are fourteen stories, and there's only one, 'The First Day,' about a little girl going to school, that has anything to do with me.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.

My father always told me I should be a writer, and I found I loved writing my autobiography; writing is such an interesting process.

Generally, my writing is influenced by living, by absorbing everything that happens to me and my actions.

My act has always reflected what's going on in my life.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.