Kathleen Hanna Quotes

It can be really powerful to write something when you're sad.

If I couldn't get published tomorrow I'd still be writing. It's something to do with feeling so overwhelmed by this experience of life that you have to tell someone about it, and in a way that reorders the experience to make it manageable.

I start with something that makes me angry or confused, and then I write about it. It's a form of self-help.

Writing for me is definitely a form of ventilation - a way for me to cope and deal with emotions. I think it is for any writer.

I write really scathing, angry stuff when I'm in a better mood, and then uplifting and happy stuff when I'm at the absolute bottom.

I just write about what makes me sad, and then when I write, I hear myself. It's like therapy, where I write something sad and then I make it happier or hopeful.

I started writing to save my life.

I tend to write about my anxieties - it's what I'm afraid will happen. And I write a story working it out.

If I'm laughing, you know I'm either very happy or very sad. I cope with things with jokes.

I tend to write songs critiquing myself. The best way for me to deal with stuff is to write a song about it... That's not to say all my songs are like that.

I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books.

I've always been one of those people that, if I am angry, I just hold it in. And I always kind of, like, wrote it in a song and put it aside for myself because it helps me get it out. It's almost like exercising; it's almost like that for me.

May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence? Write it down: write down what you feel. It is sometimes a wonderful help in misery.

As I write, I control my anxiety and anguish thanks to the invaluable aid of irony and humor. But every night I am subdued by an anxiety that knows no irony, and I must wait until the next day to rediscover the blend of anguish and humor that characterizes my writing and that generates my style.

I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.

When I kept a diary, I realised that it was all moanings and depression, and I think that is quite common.

My songs are basically my diaries. Some of my best songwriting has come out of time when I've been going through a personal nightmare.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

I guess I usually write when I'm in a really intense headspace, because it's my form of self-therapy.

I was going mad. One day, I just started writing, and it was like therapy because I was in a position where I couldn't rage. I never expected to be a writer; it's a different world than I ever expected to be in.

The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.

When I write, it's to heal. It's my own self-therapy so that I don't actually feel sad all of the time.

I've felt real pain, and sometimes I channel the exhale coming out of that to write, and those are the songs that give me the most power and the most strength.

People who write happy songs are often unhappy.

Saying things on paper that I would never, ever say, and saying things to myself, admitting things to myself, about myself and my personality, just putting it on paper, is how I deal with emotional pain.