Molly Shannon Quotes

What I write is emotionally honest and truthful as the human experience can be, to make people feel less alone, or at least that's the hope.

You do try to write songs that you feel like people can relate to and you try to be as honest as you can so that people hear your records and they feel like, "Oh, my god. This is exactly how I feel. I went through this."

I love the fact that people can relate to what I'm saying, even if it's not for the same subject I was writing about. That is the power of real music and real expression.

I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details, is how you get the big, big audiences - by talking about your relationships or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people.

You're creating an intimacy that everybody feels, that it's their experience, not yours. I'll never introduce a song and say, now this song is about 'my' broken heart.

I feel like a lot of people can relate to my music.

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?

I'm not a gifted storyteller, so I write what I know and hope that honesty resonates with other people's experiences.

So whatever I find true for myself, other people might also relate to.

There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.

I think there's just a lot of compassion in art. Again, when you're doing something that resonates with somebody else, you're going through an experience another person has had, whether it's been a painful experience or a joyous experience or a happy experience.

People ask me why I connected. It was presumptuous of me to say, but I'm Everyman. The difference is I put my thoughts into words.

I tell stories about people audiences might think they have nothing in common with, then they emotionally connect with them and find they're not different at all.

If a song's about something I've experienced or that could've happened to me it's good. But if it's alien to me, I couldn't lend anything to it. Because that's what soul is all about.

People come up to me and say, 'Can I just thank you for writing my life?' And I reply, 'I'm glad someone else is as idiotic as I am.'

The great thing about a song is that no one has to know your story. But if you tell it in a way that has clarity and means something to somebody else, then it can apply to their story.

When you're watching somebody read your material and they smile and nod, you know you've found that place where your experience and their experience match, even though they aren't the same exact experience.

I chose to present myself as one who comes from among the people, and I can be touched by their pain because I have my own.

You've got a song you're singing from your gut, you want that audience to feel it in their gut. And you've got to make them think that you're one of them sitting out there with them too. They've got to be able to relate to what you're doing.

You never write down to the people - you write the best you can with the hope that someone else will feel the same way.

Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings.

Everything is an open book. I don't speak on other people's hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I'm going to talk about it. That's what my fan base appreciates the most. I'm universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.

If you have tapped into something that is real for you, chances are you are going to tap into something that is real for someone else.

The audience likes a speaker with the same weakness and the same virtues that they themselves have.

It's a unique thing, and it's probably the thing I love most about songs and music - their ability to connect in a human way.