Sara Sheridan Quotes

It's hard to build community around mediocre and mundane writing.

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.

I try to write in a way where you care deeply what the next paragraph will be. I hear the rhythm of prose and that, to me, distinguishes great writing from ordinary writing. By the way, I don't even claim that I'm good. I claim that I value it.

I've always been drawn to the best writing that I can find. I don't care if it's in movies or theater or whatever - if you want to be in front of an audience, you have to do writing you believe in.

As a viewer, I love watching movies. There has to be an emotional connection.

Give me good writing, and I'll play it all day.

When I saw 'Talk to Her' for the first time, I was crying out loud because I couldn't imagine that I was doing that film.

The movies that are really big, at least in my experience, oftentimes don't have characters that I feel as personally connected to.

I love films, I love the way they make me feel.

Some of us get a feeling when we hear music and we feel music, and you want to figure out how to continue to feel that.

The most incredible part of seeing people embrace and recognize my music is experiencing the lives of people when they are powerfully affected, encouraged, and personally impacted.

Music can inspire immediate emotional reactions, even if the only person who hears it is the person creating it.

To share poetry is one of the most intimate acts of friendship possible.

Sometimes when reading aloud to my husband, I'll start crying. It completely stuns me. As if the words in my body and on the page - in relation to each other - are cocooned against my own feelings about what I'm writing until they're loosed in the air and become their own. Then I realize what I may or may not have done.

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 think writing letters is a lost art, but nowadays it's something that means even more, because it's so easy to communicate in so many different ways. But I find a love letter can even be a little post-it note stuck in your pocket, with a sentence or a few words.

You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.

Everything in the least connected with him has value for me; if someone even mentions his name it is like a little present to me-and I long to mention it myself

The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics.

Anything that happens after I write a song...that's fine with me. It's up to the listener to read into it what they need from it. And that's part of the reason I write like I do, so I can leave the holes in the right places so people can say, 'Yeah, that happened to me,' and they're able to have their own little fantasy about it.

What interests me very much as a writer is the ability for writing to have our lives to be occupied so vividly by others. I think that's what we long for as writers.

Writers do not write about a place because they belong there, but because they want to.

Maybe that's partly why I'm an actor, I'm a fairly empathetic, emotional person, so I get very, very involved when it's really, really great when I'm watching - so it takes me a second to click back into reality again.

All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That's not to say fiction can't be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level.

I've definitely read interviews with people where they've explained exactly what they wrote something about and I've been like: "Oh no, I was thinking that was a really beautiful love song or a really sad thing."