Steve Erickson Quotes

To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

My identity started developing through the songs I was writing.

The roles I think about and can't stop thinking about - on the subway, when I'm riding my bike, when I'm running - are the things I connect to.

I think songwriting was the biggest way that I found my identity.

Who are we when we leave our families? Who do we become? What are we capable of? That's something that never leaves us. It begins at that point in your life when you leave the nest, and I don't think we stop wanting to explore that question.

I rejected the word humorist for a long time because I thought that it meant you had, like, a cardigan sweater with patches on the elbows, but now I'm old and I do. I grew into that word. I think at heart, all this time, I've been a diarist. I'm not ashamed of it.

I think this is what college is all about: self-examination and dealing with those questions of "Who am I?"

I think I didn't know what I was creating, as much as I knew what I didn't want to do. And I didn't want my mother's life. She was an unhappy, frustrated artist who always dreamed of a life that was never going to be hers.

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in what he creates.

A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.

I believe framing reality is one of the only ways we can ever be sure it actually exists. In that regard, I feel as though I'm still learning who I am as an artist.

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

My joy as a writer is circling around and around and down and down to find out who the real person is.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

I love my father, but I have worked to develop a separate and distinct identity in different projects I have worked on.

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

I'm not interested in nostalgia; I'm interested in who I am.

There was a period when I had a hard time reconciling all the different parts of me in a way that I thought would make sense to others.

What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It's more 'thematically personal' - what's up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.

I was trying to write an autobiography using prints and patterns that reference emotional, psychological, and personal development in my work, as a person growing up, figuring out who I was. I used fabrics to stand in for occurrences.

As an actor, I don't really think you find yourself. I mean, once you find yourself, I think it becomes boring and you become set in your ways. I think, as an actor I think it's not a bad thing but more of a gift. It's something you're always doing as an actor. You're adjusting constantly.

I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work, and it creates this strange connection.

On some level, we as human beings can be who we want to be.

Everything we know by heart enriches us and helps us find ourselves. If it should get in the way of finding ourselves, it is because we have no personality.

I think understanding your life as a story is a really terrific way of kind of knowing where you are and knowing who you are.