Patricia Reilly Giff Quotes

As a writer, you rely on whatever makes you up as a person, whether those things are twisted and nasty or otherwise.

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It's more 'thematically personal' - what's up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.

The first record I spent five years writing and it was an amalgamation of all the things that happened in my life from the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty.

My writing has a lot to do with who I am, and what my life is like, and my relationships to people.

I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you.

The roles that have come into my life have taught me - and in that time period maybe I didn't even know it, but whatever came up or whatever it is that you have to express at that time, has benefitted me in a particular way.

Anything I do informs how I design. I wouldn't isolate any one activity. Everything I do feeds back to my life, and my life is expressed in my work.

A lot of my work comes from my life experiences.

I write what I write in the way that I write it. I'm not being abstract, you know. I'm talking about something that, you know, is a part of my life.

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

My writing is authentic, and whatever happens in my life is what I write about.

A complete autobiography would indeed be a picture of the outer and inner universe photographed upon one little life's consciousness. For does not the whole world, seen and unseen, go to the making up of every human being?

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.

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

Everything in life influences my music. I've always used songwriting as a means to share what I think is profound.

I write from my life, my experience. I'm selfish that way.

Inspiration for my music just comes from, you know, my life experiences.

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.

Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

You're basically the sum of all the experiences you've ever had, and they're sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.

In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences.

I can achieve that by personally relating the words that I am saying to something I have known in my life.

I think I've lived a pretty hard life. What I mean by hard is that... I've been kind of reckless with things. I'm a passionate person. I'm a super passionate person. I think there's definitely been sorrow in my life, good and bad. I think it comes through. I hope it comes through in my writing because to me that's what artistry is.