Steve Toltz Quotes

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

If you go back to all my albums, they're all confessional.

As autobiographical as say the stuff on 'Rumours' was, I don't think we thought of it as such when we were writing it.

Writing on 'Love' is so steeped in self-analysis. The writer's room can feel like therapy.

I don't think I could write about something I've never experienced or felt; all my songs are about things I've been through.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

I have never dissected my personal life. What sense would it make?

'M Train' is as close to knowing what I'm like as anything. I don't know exactly what the book is about. All and nothing, I suppose.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

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

A journal of the 'subjective' kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.

I think you can really gauge my state of mind by listening to my albums.

I feel like my songs are like diary entries for me. So I usually write about things that have happened to me specifically or sometimes it can be someone who's close to me.

I've always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.

I never reflect or convey that which I have not experienced myself.

They lyrical content has grown more introspective and less abstract. I don't know if that's good or bad... Sometimes it feels a little raw to be putting so much of myself out there.

I've always written about things that cause me to feel something.

I've always written down how I feel.

If you think my music is sentimental and self-absorbed, I agree with you.

What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.

Well, I think in my own work the subject matter usually deals with characters I know, aspects of myself, friends of mine - that sort of thing.

I don't consciously use my own life or experience at all.

The reason I write is that I'm not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.