Mark Twain Quotes

We can only connect the dots we collect, which makes everything you write about you... your connections are the thread that you weave into the cloth that becomes the story that only you can tell.

Music has as many roles as people make it.

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

I'm attracted to images that come from a personal exploration of a subject matter. When they have a personal stamp to them, then I think it becomes identifiable.

I seem to have a natural tendency to want to share my own observations and feelings with other people, and writing seems to be the way I'm best equipped to do that.

I think every song I do is specifically tailored to what I would say and how I approach situations.

I don't want to tell fans what to think or what to believe or whatever, but at the same time, some things just hit you very personally.

[Salomaybe] is my presentation, my vision of the world. Not so much to satisfy the audience at large.

I try to put my own history in my work.

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom.

I knew what I didn't want, and I knew whatever it was going to be it had to be believable and it had to come from me and I had to drive it. The way I write is very honest and when I think of the music that I listened to growing up, I loved it because I believed it.

As a man lives and thinks, so he will write.

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.

Everybody has their story to tell.

An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.

Writing is extremely personal, and that's the joy of it for me.

My style is personal, my style of writing is personal, and I believe in that. I believe what comes out of me is an individual thing, and that's why I, I believe in the individual.

There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.

I have been writing my heart out all my life, but only getting a living out of it now.... ... it's not a question of the merit of art, but a question of spontaneity and sincerity and joy I say. I would like everybody in the world to tell his full life confession and tell it his own way and then we'd have something to read in our old age.

The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.

I was never trying to be the voice for anybody else. I was just trying to sing about what I was going through, and was singing about those things specifically because I knew there was an audience not being served.

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who enjoy bird walks enjoys theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new 'attempt,' differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

God bless my soul, woman, the more personal you are the better! This is a story of human beings - not dummies! Be personal - be prejudiced - be catty - be anything you please! Write the thing your own way. We can always prune out the bits that are libellous afterwards!

I think writing is a much more personal thing.

Deep down inside we're all the same. We all have the same emotions.