Dana Goodyear Quotes

You write it down because finally, when it's written down you do get it out of your system somewhat.

Writing for me is definitely a form of ventilation - a way for me to cope and deal with emotions. I think it is for any writer.

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'

I've always written plays for the purpose of getting something out of my system.

The power of elegy, even in the face of an unbounded grief, to provide a containing form is vividly embodied by Anne Carson's 'Nox,' a nocturne with carefully controlled visual and tactile properties.

We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.

When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.

There's no better way to process pain than to write.

I feel I'm able to get rid of any demons lurking in my psyche through my writing, which leaves me free to create all of this and to enjoy our family life, stepping away from all the fictional traumas and the dramas. If I write about family in crisis, then I won't have to live through it, I guess.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.

I tend to write about my anxieties - it's what I'm afraid will happen. And I write a story working it out.

Every book for me is an exorcism in some way or another, working through my feelings at the time.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

I write it to get it out of me. I don't write it to remember it.

Writing helps me process things that are happening to me.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic - I expended a lot of frustration on that one.

Writing has become such an outlet for me that when I don't have it, I just get pent up.

Writing is a way of processing our lives. And it can be a way of healing.

I sometimes think it's like a weird elastic band. The more tragic your work is, the quicker you snap back. There's a catharsis in telling a miserable old tale; you get rid of demons.

I was going mad. One day, I just started writing, and it was like therapy because I was in a position where I couldn't rage. I never expected to be a writer; it's a different world than I ever expected to be in.

I have a mess in my head sometimes, and there's something very satisfying about putting it into words. Certainly it's not something that you're in charge of, necessarily, but writing about it, putting it into your words, can be a very powerful experience.

I just feel very lucky to be able to write fiction because I think, otherwise, I would have had to spend a fortune on a psychiatrist - and I still wouldn't get 1/100th of what I get writing fiction.