Ba Jin Quotes

I'm not an emotional person; I keep it in, and I wouldn't know how to get it out if it weren't for acting and writing.

One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.

I think I write songs because of pent-up feelings.

Sometimes I have a feeling that I just can't get rid of. Sometimes there's an experience that I want to write about that I have to get off my chest. Sometimes there are some words that appeal to you.

Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the results

I just write from how I feel. As an outlet.

I tend to write it and then let go emotionally.

I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.

Lyrically, I personally lean towards venting.

These are all personal crises, I'm sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It's as simple as that.

I get angry about stuff, I get very emotionally intense about stuff and that's how I get it out - with books, with the band, on my own onstage, but it's always kind of a wail.

There was a sadness over me, a melancholy. That's always been a part of me - those are some of the things that lead you to the arts.

No, I don't think songwriting is emotionally challenging - I feel like it's almost a way to sort through your emotions and put them out there.

I loved musicals because I felt like breaking out in song makes so much sense to me because it's the stakes of how you feel inside!

I don’t have a problem baring my emotions in music. That’s one of the reasons I’m glad to have music in my life. I’m pretty resilient as far as being a human being. A lot of songs write themselves.

It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.

I try not to take on the weight or the burden of it. Once it's on the paper, I try to leave it, because I want to surrender to what I'm supposed to write about.

And I am the kind of person that feels so much that if I didn’t have acting (and music), I would burst from all of the emotion inside!

In my sculpture, it's not an image I am seeking, it's not an idea. My goal is to re-live a past emotion. My art is an exorcism, and beauty is something I never talk about.

One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvelous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.

When I write, I tend toward melancholy, and the few times that I've tried pure joy in music, it doesn't really work that well. The joy can be through catharsis. I think that's what I do well, and observation.