Lin Yutang Quotes

I enjoy, in the summer, getting back to writing in my own voice.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience.

I've always been the audience that I wanted to reach, so I write for myself.

It's a sort of philosophy you cook up for yourself. You probably write things the same as everybody else, but it's your own personal way of saying things.

Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself, beginning with the need to define some sorts of writing as 'good' and other sorts as 'bad' is fearful behavior.

I do always write from a personal place.

You still had to find the music inside your language. You know, it was - that's a big part of what sort of moved me to begin writing the book. I wrote a little essay and I felt, yeah, this is a good voice. This is a good feeling. It feels like me.

When you write from your gut and let the stuff stay flawed and don't let anybody tell you to make it better, it can end up looking like nothing else.

Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying 'Listen to me'.

Fiction writing feels more honest to me.

You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can - buy me or not - but this is who I am as a writer.

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 new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I’m writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I’m an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

Write what you would love to read. Finish what you begin to write. Your voice is uniquely yours and we are all waiting to hear it.

Now I write often. I decided that I need to write for myself - I can't really direct other people's material.

You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership.

I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself.

Write relentlessly, until you find your voice. Then, use it.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.

Do the stuff that only you can do. The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

Writing, as I experience it, means wringing out the heart/mind until it stops lying.

Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness.

I wasn't intentionally trying to create my own path or be original, it was just I needed to say certain things and I needed to express myself, and that's how it came out.