George R. R. Martin Quotes

Every work coming from the creator is about getting the demons out, and each character in those stories had a different personal crisis to get through.

Acting is always therapeutic.

I wanted to make the album I always needed to make. I had to say the things I never could.

I always used to look at books and wonder how anybody could come up with so many words. But my divorce and then falling in love with somebody else has released in me an ability to write in other ways apart from songs.

The biggest thing that I hope people take away when they listen to my music is that they feel that there is an outlet being presented that allows them to be more authentic and for them to be more honest in their own lives.

You have to write about what's inside you. If I have to get something out, I'll do it.

When you're writing, I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. You're dealing with emotions and thoughts that are native to you. So that probably winds up in your characters.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

I was 19 years when I got into acting training classes at a TV station and then I found a way to express my feelings. My father left us when I was a kid and I just shut down all of my emotions. I wasn't talkative; I didn't know how to communicate with people. I tried to separate from people. After I got into the classes I found a way of expressing myself through characters. I can cry behind a character, I can shout behind a character and it became a relief. And it's fun.

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

I felt so much when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I felt everything. I didn't understand [myself], I was so happy yet so angry and sad. That was the point when I realized that I needed to tell stories and make characters come alive and I needed to make people cry, and make people angry, and make people happy, and make them laugh.

Writing stories, adopting other characters, making up fantastic stories and tales, this is a way of perhaps enhancing who I am. Writing stories takes a commonplace old life and makes it all somehow more interesting. And hopefully I can do that in a way that touches a lot of people in their lives, too.

Experiencing sadness and anger can make you feel more creative, and by being creative, you can get beyond your pain or negativity.

I find myself really feeling like it's possible that maybe the greater contribution I'm going to be able to make through this next phase of my life might be as a writer writing wonderful parts for women, or even writing wonderful parts for myself, you know?

That's what I love about acting, you get to find little pieces of yourself in every character you play.

What we try to do in TSAW, which is Tasha Smith Actors Workshop, is to help the actor get to the core of who they really are and how they really feel. So, we may have them do a dump, where you just basically express everything that you feel that you have not been able to express, whether it's good, bad, or ugly.

It's how I express myself - through storytelling and characters. They often reveal very intimate, vulnerable sides of myself.

It's called Sisters of the Winter Madrigal. It was interesting for me to see it done after so many years; because I wrote it and I didn't realize what a rage I was in.

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.

I've learned a lot with every character, everything from being a cop, to a lawyer to a tattoo artist. And underneath that stuff, I've been really able to find myself through the characters. It's served as a cheap form of emotional therapy.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

Exposing characters and their shortcomings gives me great comfort. It's always great to write about someone more mixed up than yourself.

I think when you're at your best as an actor, it is cathartic.