Joseph O'Neill Quotes

When you write, no matter what, it ends up personal.

I always write from a personal place - whether it be about my friends or myself or a story that I heard.

I've talked with friends about this: when you write about yourself, that's what people connect to. When you write a sermon or a lesson, that may not reach people. I've learned a lot from people who have been writing about themselves.

I tell the stories that are of interest to me.

My advice would be to write what is most personal and specific to your experience or your life. And your voice will emerge and because of its specificity, it will be universal.

Personal narrative is one of the few things where people don't get caught up in fighting over esoteric rhetoric.

I just know what I go through, and I know how to speak on it in an interesting way.

You don't always have to have the most amazing story. It's learning to share the story you have that counts.

You do your best to tell your own story, in the most specific way, and then you hope that that travels well, when it's done with heart and honesty.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

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

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.

I have no particular reader in mind, but a passionate desire to tell an honest, moving story.

I am interested in personal stories because that's when people become expressive, spontaneous and heartfelt.

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

In today's time, writing stuff that actually happened is touch-and-go, because you don't want to be too personal. If you are, then it probably won't relate to a mass audience. A lot of times you have to make it sound like it's about everybody else, but you really went through it.

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

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

The thing about storytelling is it's very stripped down; it's very much at the core of 'I'm a person and I'm just telling you this thing, and I need you to trust me and believe that what I'm saying is true, and if you believe that what I'm saying is true then we are connected to each other.' I think there's something really beautiful about that.

I love to tell stories and this is my way of getting them down on paper.

Fiction is a report from the interior.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

When I started to write 'Hannah's Child,' I realized that this had to be a book of passion, to have a certain kind of vulnerability. I think that people respond to that.

If I'm writing strictly for others, how does that show what I'm experiencing or thinking? I just got to a point where I realized I could be as personal as I wanted to be and people could relate to those situations if they so choose.

I realized I couldn't have one foot in the fiction world and one foot in the nonfiction world, which is why 'Here I Go Again' is so not me. I didn't graduate from high school in the '90s, I never listened to metal music, and I don't time travel.