Ruth Benedict Quotes

...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

It's hard for me to say that what I'm doing isn't even really music, because deep inside of me, what I want to do is much greater than music.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

As a young woman, I had been seeking experience, knowledge, truth, the stuff writers need in their work, but when the artist actually kicked in, I came to understand that in this romantic relationship I was not free to be myself, or to find myself, in order to begin the true work I needed to do.

I want to struggle and make films. It's not a financial thing, it's more of a who-I-am thing.

I've spent most of my life writing and developing everything that I've wanted to be in - which is why I started writing in the first place.

I don't know if I'm selfless - I still want to make a great record. I want to make a hit record. I want to tour; that's not completely selfless. But the truth is I'm not interested in people coming to my show for me as much as I am for them coming to my show for themselves. That's always been how I am.

I think being creative and making something that you can look at is so good for your brain and your soul. Nothing beats it.

This job forces you to ask yourself so many questions: Do you want money? Do you want power? Do you just want to be good at your craft? I don't know what I'm doing. I just want to be happy. But I know I have to keep making music.

At the end of the day, I just do my job. I love my art. But I genuinely want to change the world. I'm very generous, and I really want people to see that I am - that's really it.

I had fame and wealth and things that are supposed to make you happy, but I wasn't happy, because there's no importance on having a fulfilling life. So in my mid-40s, that was my pursuit - making films that interested me, films that I would like to go see.

I think I'm just doing me, my music, my shows, and my stories.

I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there

Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me.

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

Many people dedicate their lives to actualizing a concept of what they should be like, rather than actualizing themselves. This difference between self-actualization and self-image actualization is very important. Most people live only for their image

I will not be alone if I am my true self. Only by trading my true self for the companionship of another have I ever made myself alone. Because when I gave up my real self, I wound up resenting my "significant other" for "making me" do that-and it was this resentment that ate away at our relationship.

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

No matter what, I need to maintain my sense of self and always be true to who I am. And that while there are always going to be roadblocks along the way, you're going to be just fine, as long as you learn from each setback.

I feel like if I were to play the game completely and just get myself in a giant bottle of nail polish and put myself on display, I would feel like I had somehow cosmically lost. I feel like I'm taking a bunch of the ingredients and using some of them but not all of them and shuffling around and making people think I'm doing my job.

I'm writing for the sake of writing music. Whether it gets heard or not isn't an issue for me. It keeps my own juices going and my mind active.