Layne Staley Quotes

I found in my writing that I could express emotions that, as an everyday person, I have no interest in expressing: these strange things that girls talk about called feelings.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

Writing does not exclude the full life; it demands it.

Anyone who has problems, or worries, anyone who laughs and cries, anyone who feels can write. It's only talking on paper... talking about the things that matter to us.

I've always written down how I feel.

Reading English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate.

Writing on 'Love' is so steeped in self-analysis. The writer's room can feel like therapy.

It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

You live through stuff, and it affects the way you feel about the world, and you write about it.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

I wrote a book called ‘Dancing The Dream’. It was more autobiographical than Moonwalk, which I did with Mrs. Onassis. It wasn’t full of gossip and scandal and all that trash that people write, so I don’t think people paid much attention to it, but it came from my heart. It was essays, thoughts and things that I’ve thought about while on tour

One thing that I believe is that every time I write something, I am taking the time to celebrate. Even if I am writing a sad story or an angry poem, I am still giving those stories my time and attention.

I'm gonna write from personal experience, from emotion, from whatever the hell I'm feeling that day.

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

You know what, I just write what I feel.

When I write, I make discoveries about my feelings.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

I've always expressed myself best through writing. I've gotten out all of my deepest feelings that way for as long as I can remember.

I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.

For me, poetry was... the fastest way to express what I was feeling, what I was going through.

I feel like I really tapped into a pretty honest emotional place for myself as a lyricist. There's a broad spectrum of emotions.