Tim Cahill Quotes

All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

As I experience life and go through things, that's what I write about.

I'm most happy when I am writing at night, because I need space and time to write.

I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.

I knew I wanted to be creative but didn't know how.

I'm always trying to find myself little holes where I can do some songwriting.

When I'm on my own with my camera, taking these pictures, it feels as if I am in a room of my own, a self-contained world.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

I like the idea that Ernest Hemingway always wrote about certain things he knew, he knew the ins and outs, back to fronts of what he was talking about. I love that as an inspiration for myself, to keep it true to what you know. I'm always writing little lines and saving them for later.

Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.

Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.

I always try to write about something that's actually happened or it doesn't always have to have happened to me, but it has to have happened at some point. So every single lyric that you hear comes from some kind of story that I've come across in my life. I like to think that that maybe helps me mean it a bit more and if you don't mean it, it ceases to be soul music.

Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

One of the most satisfying aspects of writing is that it can open in us deep wells of hidden treasures that are beautiful for us as well as for others to see.

Home again, I can groan, scratch, and talk to myself.

Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.

I'm most connected to myself when I'm alone in a room, moving my hand across a page. That's when I feel most like me.

Now I write often. I decided that I need to write for myself - I can't really direct other people's material.