Edith Schaeffer Quotes

I love to write and I assure you I write regularly... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.

There is a marvelous peace in not publishing ... I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.

There is no better feeling than when you write something you know is a piece of you and that, at some point, is going to communicate with someone else.

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.

I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. Sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.

I'm writing for the sake of writing music. Whether it gets heard or not isn't an issue for me. It keeps my own juices going and my mind active.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

Music I can discover a part of myself that I haven't been able to for a long time, and acting is the opposite. I'm in love with both of them and I would never choose one over the other.

I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.

I write for myself; I release the albums to connect with everyone else.

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

In my mind, the plays I was writing were extreme examples of art for art's sake. I didn't necessarily think that other people would love them, though I thought they probably would.

I enjoy, in the summer, getting back to writing in my own voice.

I didn't have any concept of Trainspotting being published. It was a selfish act. I did it for myself.

There's a certain freedom in writing when you don't know if you'll ever have an audience.

I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself.

My best writing has always been in journals.

One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.

If there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.

I've never not been pleased with one of my albums. I figure because it's spoken word, there will be people who relate to it, and people who don't, so I don't worry about any of that. I've been doing it for over twenty years. I've always written because it was something I had to do, never for the glory.

When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.

I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.