Sarah Kay Quotes

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

I really don't feel that writing is therapy.

I write in order to find out what I truly know and how I really feel about certain things. Writing requires me to go much deeper into my thoughts and memories than conversation does. Writing provides the solitude necessary to reflect on being in this world.

Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go, 'Oh, that's what this is all about,' and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.

Writing is a type of therapy for me. I'm always trying to break down what happened, and why I felt a certain way.

My only way of processing anything for me is by writing.

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

In the writing, I'm just trying to go deeper, emotionally, and learn more about myself and reveal more and find a way to connect with people in new ways.

I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.

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.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.

Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.

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’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something.

When I write, I make discoveries about my feelings.

I write poetry to figure things out. Any time I’m trying to wrap my head around something, poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me.

Writing is making sense of life.

My art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are? ... my art gives meaning to my life.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.