Anne Sexton Quotes

My work is intensely personal.

Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I'll be naked for you. It will be our covenant.

Beyond just writing about falling in love and out of love and wanting to do certain things and going out and partying and all the things that I grew up writing about, I want to write about deeper things.

'Warm Bodies' ended up becoming one of the most personal relatable things I've written.

But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.

Your life is meant for you to understand and process, not to make anyone else happy.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

Tell me about yourself - your struggles, your dreams, your telephone number.

Your fortune is not something to find but to unfold.

The more you're writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it's at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.

In silence - and in self-defense - I figured things out in my own little way.

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

Your sole contribution to the sum of things is yourself.

The best thing we can do is develop our own.

In the end I'm the only one who knows me.

It has cost me a great deal to become myself. I don't want to be another person.

When you write, no matter what, it ends up personal.

A man is, after all, what he loves. But one always feels cornered when asked to explain why one loves this or that person, and what for. In order to explain it - which inevitably amounts to explaining oneself - one has to try to love the object of one's attention a little bit less.

You want to live your life and live it just as fully and as deeply as you can. That's your deep well of reserve. That's where you get all your - the fodder for your work.

I am my own muse, the subject I know best.

I have a personal philosophy in life: If somebody else can do something that I'm doing, they should do it. And what I want to do is find things that would represent a unique contribution to the world - the contribution that only I, and my portfolio of talents, can make happen. Those are my priorities in life.

For me, doing an interview with someone is like having therapy.