Michael Pollan Quotes

I honestly in a lot of ways don't want to sing about my real life, because that's private.

I've never been a confessional writer.

Mostly, I don't write overtly personal stuff.

I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.

We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.

I've been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don't tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.

As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.

I write about so much personal stuff, it's like reading my diary.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy.

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.

There's a line I have that our family was designed more for public than for private. But there are definitely some things that are only mine. I am someone who dreams at night, and you don't know what I'm dreaming.

There are big parts of my life that I don't share. I don't share myself eating dinner with my family. I don't talk about who I'm dating. That's private; that's me.

I don't write about my life in my column.

I always write stories, and I write poems, too. I just never sell them to anybody, but I write them. They're good, too. They never leave the house. They're too disclosing.

I have an affinity for writing in the first person. I love the intimacy of being dropped inside the character.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it's so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

The first person is a tradition I relate to and that I use; historically, it's been the voice I work in. But the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I'm referred to as a 'confessional' writer.

Surely the whole point of writing your own life story is to be as honest as you possibly can, revealing everything about yourself that is most private and probably most interesting for that very reason.

Everything I write is highly personal, but put in such a way that it's not dropping everything in someone's lap. Although sometimes I think 'The Taxi Ride' embarrasses me, because sometimes I think it's too close.

No one is reading my diary, that's for sure.

I have no interest in writing confessions, in deliberately baring myself to my readers. I prefer to remain behind a screen.

My book has a lot of parts of my life that people don't know about.

If something is going on in my life, it winds up getting into my strip.