Julia Glass Quotes

I was writing songs from when I was 12. My songs always came from questions that I need answers for.

I don't investigate things by writing about them, but let them build up inside of me.

Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.

Writing on 'Love' is so steeped in self-analysis. The writer's room can feel like therapy.

I write what I write and I honestly don't care if it gets on or not. I'm writing to see if I can find out some of what I think about any number of situations. I work it out in the writing.

Music is like a mirror in front of you. You're exposing everything, but surely that's better than suppressing. You have to dig deep and that can be hard for anybody, no matter what profession. I feel that I need to actually push myself to the limit to feel happy with the end result.

If you are disappearing from yourself, but you're still writing, then there is a kind of activity of thinking going on, which in my world is similar to what's going on in music.

I use poetry to help me work through what I don’t understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I’ve been.

I, myself, write to change my life, to make it come out the way I want it to. But other people write for other reasons: to see more closely what it is they are thinking about, what they may be afraid of. Sometimes writers write to solve a problem, to answer their own question. All these reasons are good reasons. And that is the most important thing I'll ever tell you. Maybe it is the most important thing you'll ever hear. Ever.

I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.

if I'd thought that nobody would like it as I was writing it, I would have written it even more. But I never think of the audience. I never think of people reading. I never think of people, period.

I write poetry to figure things out. It's what I use as a navigating tool in my life, so when there's something that I just can't understand, I have to "poem" my way through it. For that reason I write a lot about family, because my family confuses me and I'm always trying to figure them out. I write a lot about love, because love is continually confusing in all of its many glorious aspects.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity.

Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.

I make films because I have not learned anything else and I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

Heartbreak allows us to also experience joy and love but you have to walk through heartbreak to even know what joy is. Heartbreak is a constant and it is even necessary. It allows us the opportunity of introspection and exploration. Those processes are what is necessary to write and engage in the arts.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

I'm trying to listen to my past, listen to what's most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world - to listen to that world, to search.

One of the aspects I like about the film is that there is a kind of emotional, psychological discussion during the storytelling, ... Before taking a drug, go through yourself, experience yourself, all your hopes and fears in your own time. Before the pharmacology, do the psychology.

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.

Writing, for me, means humility. It’s a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you’re writing honestly.