Paulo Coelho Quotes

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

The way I write my songs is that I have to believe what I'm writing about, and that's why they always end up being so personal - because the kind of artists I like, they convince me, they totally win me over straight away in that thing. Like, 'Oh my God, this song is totally about me.'

If I want people to connect to my words and my stories, I need to tell them where they came from. Because then, when you break into song, they have kind of a blueprint for why I wrote that song, so they can come to it with something they went through that helps them connect to it.

Anything I've not experienced I do not look to for a subject. I have to feel it.

I'm often moved by the circumstances around some of my characters, but I don't think I've actually cried watching myself.

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

I have the great privilege of being both witness and storyteller. Intimacy, trust and intuition guide my work.

Emotional information is very, very rich in influence. You're giving somebody something to connect with, to see themselves in.

Amy Winehouse affected my life tremendously. I think maybe she was the first sense of intimacy that I had with a complete stranger, musically speaking.

We write songs that hit different people at different ages where they live.

I do not believe that with a fictional character you can force yourself too far away from yourself. There has to be some of you in it.

My songwriting is personal in the hope that listeners will know that I relate to them.

What I have that's special in my music is substance. It's music that people can really relate to. I know I'm gonna rap something that somebody has already been through in their life, something that they will understand.

I'm still writing from personal experiences, which is what people connected with in the first place.

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

I am her friend, and her tongue is in my mouth. I can speak her sentiments for her, though Ethel Waters can do very well indeed in speaking for herself.

A handwritten letter carries a lot of risk. It's a one-sided conversation that reveals the truth of the writer. Furthermore, the writer is not there to see the reaction of the person he writes to, so there's a great unknown to the process that requires a leap of faith. The writer has to choose the right words to express his sentences, and then, once he has sealed the envelope, he has to place those thoughts in the hands of someone else, trusting that the feelings will be delivered, and that the recipient will understand the writer's intent. How childish to think that could be easy.

People will never forget how you made them feel.

Usually, when you're in a movie, you're disconnected from it. You're never going to feel what you felt when you made it.

A certain ultra-dignified gentleman of unusual prominence carried himself so stiffly that nobody felt free to call him by his first name. He quarreled with a friend of earlier days and from then on the two never spoke. The day the friend died an associate found the ultra-dignified gentleman staring through the window. When he came out of his reverie, he soliloquized with a sigh, ""He was the last to call me John."" Is any man really entitled to regard himself a success who has failed to inspire at least a goodly number of fellow mortals to greet him by his first name?

We long to find someone who has been where we've been, who shares our fragile places, who sees our sunsets with the same shades of blue. Soul mates. They somehow validate the depth of our experiences.

We get these really deep and emotional fan letters sometimes that are so heartbreaking or shocking or haunting sometimes that I can kind of relate to them in my own way and connect with our fans in that way.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

Those of us who make films try to make something that we're feeling and that we would like. Then we just hope an audience responds the same way. It's very important to have the electrical circuit made, but I don't have control over how people feel when they flip the switch. So the whole idea of marketing research and test screenings is just foreign to me.

We [me and Alison McGhee] probably wouldn't have said that when we were writing the stories, but it is so apparent to me in the finished product. For me, looking at Bink, it's like looking at myself on the page in a way that I've never experienced with any other book that I've written.