Paul Thomas Anderson Quotes

Generally, my writing is influenced by living, by absorbing everything that happens to me and my actions.

I am so enriched because so much has happened in my life. The way I can express myself is because of the life I have led. It's only when you experience life can you emote it.

Everything is a piece of me, a moment of my life.

We thought: 'Let's write songs about our relationships, the world, our anxieties - let's make the most of this.'

My writing is authentic, and whatever happens in my life is what I write about.

I'm into people's emotional lives and relationships and the complications of living. That's my turf.

Everything in my life affects my writing. There are no separate parts of my life.

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

My act has always reflected what's going on in my life.

I'm so deeply interested in what it feels like to be other people that I get to operate under the illusion when I'm writing fiction that I'm not really revealing that much about myself. But, of course, I am, and I know that I am. And yet there's this sort of membrane that I get to work behind as I write my fiction, and I love it.

As we get more technically driven, the importance of people becomes more than it's ever been before. You have to utilize who you are in your work. Nobody else can do that: nobody else can pull from your background, from your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience.

Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life.

Whatever I'm writing comes organically out of my life.

I can achieve that by personally relating the words that I am saying to something I have known in my life.

I've been in many relationships in my life and learned a lot from them, good and bad.

For many people, I was a phase, a part of the period of growing up. People ask me why I connected. It was presumptuous of me to say, but I'm Everyman. The difference is I put my thoughts into words.

My comedy notebooks are filled with random journal entries. It's all the same. I can look back on old joke notebooks, and know exactly what was going on in my life.

I also believe that writing becomes worthwhile and vitalized only through a full and exciting life.

I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.

Fighting for identity is something that is very much in my life.

In order for me to write, I have to experience life. I write the songs based on real life, and I perform them from a very real place.

Everything I have experienced in my life helps form who I am today, and I would not change or forget any of it.

As I experience life and go through things, that's what I write about.

The roles that have come into my life have taught me - and in that time period maybe I didn't even know it, but whatever came up or whatever it is that you have to express at that time, has benefitted me in a particular way.

I love my friends and my past, and it's made me who I am.