Meghan Daum Quotes

I've never been a confessional writer.

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.

To me, writing is a personal thing; I write super-personal, autobiographically.

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

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.

Really, as a writer, I believe that if you're going to write about your own life, you need to do it as honestly and candidly as you are capable.

Coming off 'Reflection,' what we really wanted to do was be more vulnerable.

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

Everything I've written is personal - it's the only way I know how to write.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

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 don't think I've ever laid out a batch of songs that pick myself apart the way that these do.

I think the hardest stories we tell are always the ones about ourselves. And as a journalist, I was taught that I'm never supposed to put myself in the story. So I spent what, 11, 12 years of my life writing about other people so I don't have to face my own life.

They lyrical content has grown more introspective and less abstract. I don't know if that's good or bad... Sometimes it feels a little raw to be putting so much of myself out there.

When you're teaching creative nonfiction, it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, 'Look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you're writing about?'

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

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.

I think that, for me, the great books like that, autobiographies, are great when the artists who write them throw caution to the wind and really put it out there as they saw it.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.

When you write a memoir, and it's your life, and you're exposing things that are close to home, it's hard to see it changed.

I think I do overshare. It's my way of trying to understand myself.

I'm such a first-person writer.

Look, anything any writer writes is going to be on some level autobiographical. Part of the funny/sad thing is that you don't always know how autobiographical you're being.

There's a beautiful, kind of seductive trap in being autobiographical in our writing of songs: We just get stuck in our own syrup, and it's so personal that it almost can be embarrassing to the listener.