Claire Tomalin Quotes

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.

So it was just funny to read a script that was just similar to what had been going on in my life.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.

I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.

Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a picture book, a speech or anything, really, it has so much to do with what I'm going through personally or a problem I'm trying to work out. When I wrote my novel 'Baby,' my three children had all just gone out the door.

Because of the wonderfully positive response to 'Life's That Way,' I am considering writing some more autobiographical stuff - maybe another book. I don't know. It doesn't help that I'm lazy.

As a writer, I wouldn't know how to not take things out of my life.

I write to be truthful in my songs, which is why I wrote what's painfully truthful about my life in my autobiography.

I'm always inspired to write, and it's usually my own life experiences that inspire me.

I always like to write where I'm at in real life into whatever I'm working on.

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.

You'd only write what you know and what you know is what you do and the people you know. So you'd write about them or the people you have met casually. It's part of your life.

I see my albums as working diaries, as living scrapbooks of me and my life.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

I think everything I have done in my life, my reasons at the time were right no matter how things worked out.

I don't go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it's contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

I think that I write about stuff that others don't write about. I don't have a bunch of love songs cuz I don't really have much boy experience. I just write about what I am actually going through in my real life.

As I read more and more - and it was not all verse, by any means - my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

What I write about in my novels is also what's in my life.

I don't think my music has changed to reflect getting married or having kids. But... if you want to continue to write your own songs, you've got to find deeper stuff to write about. You've got to go to different places.

Anything I write is going to be autobiographical and true to some degree.