Taryn Manning Quotes

Through art, you create your own world.

I came to filmmaking because it's my passion. I decided I can't have it distorted or marred by someone else deciding what it should be.

My films, no one else will do.

You need to see yourself in what you direct, I think - directing is quite self-indulgent from that point of view.

Rap lyrics are really the only thing I've ever written.

I realized that music was the only thing I really thought about - music and writing.

When I'm writing my album, it's totally my world. Even though it's myself and another producer creating the project, Conceptually it's more under my power and on my own terms. At the same time, it's a different type of pressure because I'm ultimately speaking, I'm solely responsible for the end result.

I'm not really a full-time director, I just like to direct the things that I write because I think I'm going to know it better than someone else.

Writing is too hard not to do exactly what you want to do. It's a very draining and agonizing process for me, and I don't want to live with any piece of work that I don't believe in completely. I have to believe completely in what I'm doing. It has grown organically out of my own experience.

It's really liberating and fun to be writing stuff for myself, and really have the freedom to say what I want to say and not really have to think about what somebody else is going to say or have to edit myself to speak from someone else's vision.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

The books are always there, just the way you wrote them. The plays often don't turn out the way you wanted them to because in the theater, you're always involved with collaborators and they don't always see the work the way you do.

I would like to sit and and write some acoustic stuff. That's what I want to do. It means creatively, that's what I want so I need to do that for myself and then I'll see.

What I have to say is all in the music. If I want to say anything, I write a song.

I'm the person who writes most of my movies so every role is exactly what I want to be doing.

I love playing and I love singing, and the writing. There's kind of a symbiotic relationship between the writing and the playing.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

Love is what makes you do everything. It really does conquer all. With my first album, I was writing about empowerment hoping that would make it true. And now it is. I'm in charge. I make the rules. I've been writing since I was nine years old and I'm very much involved in the creative process. And now that I'm in a happier place in my personal life, I'm spitting songs out left and right.

I was the audience he wanted to reach. Gram Parsons' writing brought his own personal generations poetry and vision into the very traditional format of country music, and he came up with something completely different

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.

The opening line from a journal can be the beginning of a song.

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

The songs that I sing and the songs that I write have always just been what I feel my voice does well, and what my inspirations have been and a kind of culmination of everything.

Play and write music the way you want the world to be.

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.