Cecile McLorin Salvant Quotes

There's so much stuff that you see every day that you want to talk about, but I'm not the type to open up, so the only way I could open up is through music.

I often write things, and then I think it's too personal for the Moodies. It's not something that I could share with other guys to say.

I write music about what's going on in my head, what I'm angry about, and what I think is wrong/right.

How truly does this journal contain my real and undisguised thoughts--I always write it according to the humour I am in, and if astranger was to think it worth reading, how capricious--insolent & whimsical I must appear!--one moment flighty and half mad,--the next sad and melancholy. No matter! Its truth and simplicity are its sole recommendations.

Music is about expressing things you can't in everyday life.

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

I think you can really gauge my state of mind by listening to my albums.

Hmmm. I think a lot of people can write poems that are howls of anguish. I think I've probably written such things and then torn them up.

Poetry says the things that I can't say. I read a lot, but I never write it.

I always kept a diary - not a diary like, 'Dear Diary, we got up at 5 A.M., and I wore the weird hair again and that white dress! Hi-yeee!' I'd just write.

Writing is my therapy. My feelings build up inside of me and then I sit down and write a song.

I think I write songs because of pent-up feelings.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

When you listen to records like 'Foreclosure,' that's like me sitting in a room by myself just rapping about things that's running across my mind and things that have been bothering me.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn't express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

You write in songs what you're too scared to write in real life, and then you sing the songs to loads of people instead of telling it to the person you should be telling it to... Songs are a great way of dealing with those issues but kind of a coward's way as well.

I am expressive but secretive about my emotions.

We all need ways of processing things. I think I was called to music because it was this thing that was always there for me that I could pour my heart into safely.

Maybe someday there will be a song I write that I never let see the light of day because I don't want it to be uncontainable and have to play it again. And I have written songs like that that are just for me. It's like writing a letter to someone you're angry at but never sending it and just putting it in a drawer.

Some days, I'll be very down and out, but you won't be able to tell, really, because I don't express that side of myself on social media. That's the side of myself that I express through music.

Songwriting really kicked in with the guitar. I was going through a lot as a kid. There had been a lot of transitions in my family. So it just became a total therapy, like most artists.

For me personally, I'm always writing from what's happening in my emotional life. Even without thinking about it a lot of the time, it comes out in the songs that I'm writing.

I was writing for myself, not to be published. I was writing diaries, even letters, to myself or to anyone I was angry at. Sometimes they weren't to a person, they were just to the universe - a bit like penning daydreams or isolated thoughts.

Sometimes there’s no one to listen to what you really might like to say at a certain moment. The paper always listens.

I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say.