Jessamyn West Quotes

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'

For me writing is so perplexing, because if we were playing ping pong and we weren't writing - twenty years later you'd be just so much better at ping pong and this confidence with ping pong.

I think I'm more sympathetic to writers, to the work and the struggle and the craft of it, than when I was in graduate school at NYU and was very judgmental.

I had a lot of songs and words and scenes stuck inside of me. So Jacknife encouraged me to bring them all out. So, in essence, 'You and Others' is my diary.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

I really don't feel that writing is therapy.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

Everyone has a book inside of them - but it doesn't do any good until you pry it out.

Writing gave me a life.

My identity started developing through the songs I was writing.

In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.

I've said very openly that the first aspect of my artistry to arrive was writing. It took me a good number of years to find my voice.

The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.

Try to think of writing as a gift - more complexly put: it is the curse and the cure.

The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way. You get a chance to know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a relationship with your mind.

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.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it.

Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.

When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

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.

Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.

I write to discover what I think.

I think that I have grown a lot as an artist. I have been writing about my experiences of love and overcoming the struggles that I have faced in the music industry. I have so much more to tell my fans, and I know so much more about myself. It is crazy how much I have grown over these past years.