Eudora Welty Quotes

To live is to war with trolls in heart and woul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.

I'm trying to get in the habit of, you know, picking up a book and learning how to write my feelings down, not my feelings but my thoughts, about things, and hopefully I'll moving toward the writing and directing thing soon.

I really don't feel that writing is therapy.

I never judge my own songwriting. It's just my heart. What's there to judge about your own heart?

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

There is a little bit of me in every part I do... I'm not really good enough to completely construct an all-new character.

Writing has certainly helped me explore about 20,000 versions of my authentic self. I suppose that's what most writers discover if they write long enough: there are a lot of selves roaming around in there.

There's so much to learn in writing and in life, and in any particular era in one's life, it seems like a few concerns have to be dealt with at once or else something really bad could happen. Writing seems like the place to deal with those concerns.

The writing process really became natural when it was real and from my heart, and I was exposed.

I'm not trying to take over the world, but I find it really rewarding to write, and I thrive on learning.

If you want to know whether you have written anything worth preserving, sing it to yourself without any accompaniment.

In the writing, I'm just trying to go deeper, emotionally, and learn more about myself and reveal more and find a way to connect with people in new ways.

I was 45 when I wrote most of this book [Hungry Heart ], at what felt like a halfway point in my life, and I thought, If I can't be honest now, when will it happen? It was so hard to step away from the [protection of] fiction, but I'm ready to talk start telling their truth.

I think to the degree writers are serious, there is a greater tendency for them to write to themselves, because they're trying to compose their own thoughts. They are trying to find out what is in their minds, which is the great mystery. Finding out who you are, what is in your head, and what kind of companion you are to yourself in the course of life. I do think people have very profound lives of which they say virtually nothing.

I write to discover what I think.

The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.

I'm gonna write from personal experience, from emotion, from whatever the hell I'm feeling that day.

I realized I was never going to have any peace with myself unless I made an honest stab at trying to write.

Before I started writing my album, I didn't tell people many things. But because I'm going to the studio every day and telling strangers my deepest and darkest emotions, it's made me more of an open book. I wear my heart on my sleeve a lot more now than I did.

To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

In a lot of senses, things are definitely changing in my life, and with what's going on around me. But I still feel like the writing process is as intimate as it as before, if not more. Because I need my time more than I had before.