Ring Lardner Quotes

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

If I'm not crying while writing a song, I'm not doing it right.

I don't even like to cry in private.

I'm not an emotional person; I keep it in, and I wouldn't know how to get it out if it weren't for acting and writing.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

It's easier to write about heartbreak after you've had your heart broken. You have more material to draw from, you can extrapolate from your own experiences and make reasonable assumptions about how your characters would feel and act.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

When they saw you kneeling, crying words you mean. Opening their eyeballs, eyeballs, pretending that your Al Green, Al Green.

When I write, I tend toward melancholy, and the few times that I've tried pure joy in music, it doesn't really work that well. The joy can be through catharsis. I think that's what I do well, and observation.

My way is the sensitive, emotional way, because that's who I am. A day doesn't go by where I don't sit and cry, listening to the stories. I try to be the clown and court jester and make people laugh.

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

Holding a tear back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you're left with a stub of a neck and nothing more.

All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.

As a songwriter, you're allowed to write anything, and as a person, I am all colors in the rainbow. I've been through everything, you know, so I can write a positive song like 'Better Get to Livin'' because that's my attitude. But that doesn't mean I'm happy all the time. You can't be a deep and serious songwriter without feelings. You kinda have to live with your feelings out on your sleeve and get hurt more than most people. The fear I might get hurt means I might not be able to write another song.

I almost never cry, and it's something I don't like about myself. I sometimes try and make myself cry. Sometimes, when I'm in pain, I say if I could just cry it would make it so much easier.

In a world where irony reigns, where you have to separate, protect and laugh at anything that is honest or has an emotional charge, I bet for catharsis. I like to invest emotionally in things. And catharsis, when it touches the emotional vein, can open the doors of even those who protect themselves.

I often want to cry. That is the only advantage women have over men - at least they can cry.

I think we all have a lot of darkness in our bellies. As an actor, the challenge of tapping into that, reaching down into that sadness or anger, is very therapeutic.

When I look at the majority of my own songs they really came from my own sense of personal confusion or need to express some pain or beauty - they were coming from a universal and personal place.

My work is always more emotional than I am. My characters say things to each other that I get accused of not being able to say to my girlfriend.

I spent a lot of my life holding back my cries, and I want to change that because it's not good for me.

I am a human being. When you are frustrated, you do cry. It's more than once that I cried.