Tim Minchin Quotes

When my son was born, and after a day of lying-in I was told that I could leave the hospital and take him home, I burst into tears. It wasn't the emotion of the moment: it was shock and horror.

I didn't have to say it. I just had to write it. It was painful enough.

When my daughter was born, I said: 'I feel like I know what I've been waiting my whole life to be.'

I remember being in tears at the hospital after Chloe was born, at the thought that someday she would have to leave home.

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

Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

I think pain is the best feeling for song writing. You can write good happy songs, but I think the kind of bruiting, depressing ones are more effective. They are easier to write when I am impassioned and angry. It is a good way to channel that negative energy.

I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again.

The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I'm shocked by the deeply personal things I've put into books without realizing it.

I get angry about stuff, I get very emotionally intense about stuff and that's how I get it out - with books, with the band, on my own onstage, but it's always kind of a wail.

All parents remember the moment when they first held their children - the tiny crumpled face, an entire new person, emerging from the hospital blanket.

I thought I knew what love was before giving birth to my baby, but whatever I had experienced in the past paled in comparison to the utterly unconditional love I immediately felt for the little bundle I now held in my arms.

It's hard for me to feel bad when I'm writing well.

You don't know what love is until you meet your child.

Not to be a bummer, but heartbreak is great for inspiration - we all know that - and it's really hard to write songs if I go through a phase where I don't feel much.

Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system.

In my personal life, dark material is kind of an emptying out - it leaves more room for light. If I'm writing a particularly awful scene, something is released in the process.

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.

During the pregnancy and stuff, I knew I had a daughter coming but when she finally got here that is when it really hit me. Ever since that day, I look at life a lot differently.

Often, I write to feel better and to heal - to cope with things that I'm dealing with. I'm either writing to get out of a feeling or to get into the feeling, to feel it more. Usually it's the perfect remedy, but if it isn't, I focus on other parts of what I'm making that don't involve writing. If neither are working, I simply forfeit the day.

'Winnie the Pooh's Grand Adventure' - the movie where Rabbit adopts a baby bird and raises her, and then the bird grows up and flies away and leaves him - I cried.

...he makes me feel out of control and out of my head. He is exhilarating and terrifying. I see and feel him everywhere, and I'm always grasping for equilibrium even when he's not there... I feel like I'm always falling in love, falling and falling and falling.