Henry Rollins Quotes

When I write for myself, I think about myself and draw from my own experience.

Everything I write is about me.

We write about ourselves because we know about ourselves.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.

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

Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself.

Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.

All of my songs are autobiographical.

To me, writing is a personal thing; I write super-personal, autobiographically.

I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.

I tend to write from a personal place, and most of the time when I'm writing by myself, it's coming from something I've experienced.

I find it hard to write in the first person.

I've never been a confessional writer.

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Everything I've written is personal - it's the only way I know how to write.

Everyone eventually winds up writing about themselves - the problem is finding the best way to go about it. To write about oneself literally, in the first person, presumes a more interesting personal life and philosophy than most rock lyricists possess. John Lennon was good for one great album based on musical direct address, 'Plastic Ono Band.'

I write from my life, my experience. I'm selfish that way.

It's while writing that suddenly a point of view appears: 'So, that's what I really thought about this thing'. Then it feels part of me.

In a sense, any story that anyone writes is going to be autobiographical - whether it deals directly with the author's experience or not - because it captures what we're obsessed with while working on that particular piece.

There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf both wrote about. A blog. Perhaps we all are waiting for someone to discover us.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.