Wally Lamb Quotes

Because they're my stories, they're my version of events of the past three years. But I really hope people can hear their own stories within the songs and they can become our version of events.

I had discovered that I'm much less special than I thought I am. So whatever I find true for myself, other people might also relate to.

What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people's dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats - and they in turn can listen to ours.

You want people - I want people to relate to me as a character. I want them to go, 'That could have been me,' or, 'I know someone like that.'

I am paid to dive deeper into my own humanity and do that with other people in collaboration... so that, in and of itself, I just feel like is the greatest privilege in the world.

The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.

Things that feel super personal actually feel really universal. It's sort of the more you really identify something specific within yourself, the more people connect to it because ultimately we are all connected in some way.

I try to stick with what moves me or teaches me about myself, same thing I hope the novels do for others.

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.

And he who does not know himself does not know others, so it may be said with equal truth, that he who does not know others knows himself but very imperfectly.

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.

What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.

Nobody understands another's sorrow, and nobody another's joy.

I just think that the only way we come to ourselves is through each other.

I relate to people and roles that are about the arc of human experience, things that everyday people deal with every day.

I think you learn more about yourself in the context of a relationship than you can outside of it.

You say to yourself: 'What could people, in all these countries, find in my books?' and yet I think we're all the same, anywhere. Everybody is a hero or a dramatic person in their own story if you just know where to look.

I think my job is hopefully to connect with people emotionally and to feel less alone or understand things in a certain way.

I do believe that music has an intense power to connect us together, to inspire us to become ourselves.

I wanted to live the inner life of every man I saw, look at the world through his eyes.

But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know of our own heart?

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

If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.

When I went to see certain shows when I was a kid, they changed my life. They made me tap into that place inside myself that I was unable to get to, so music is that tool, that bridge, and that's the kind of music I'm interested in making.