Frederick Douglass Quotes

A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.

My songs are a direct route into my brain and my heart.

My songs are just little letters to me.

I won't get into it any more than to say that there are parts of me in all the songs that I write.

For me it's very important to express my thoughts, the pictures I carry inside of me, maybe because it's important to get them out.

Sometimes there’s no one to listen to what you really might like to say at a certain moment. The paper always listens.

All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.

If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

My diary has its own kind of magic. It gives me the feeling of having accomplished something. On days when I don't have time for this, I feel tortured.

Writing mirrors the interior self. You know, any book is like the perfect blueprint of the psyche of the author.

I don't see why it's impossible to express everything that's on one's mind.

Recently I began reading my old diaries. Back to before the war. Gradually I became very depressed. The reason for that is probably that I wrote only when there were obstacles and halts to the flow of life, seldom when everything was smooth and even. ... As I read I distinctly felt what a half-truth a diary presents.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me--a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books.

How truly does this journal contain my real and undisguised thoughts--I always write it according to the humour I am in, and if astranger was to think it worth reading, how capricious--insolent & whimsical I must appear!--one moment flighty and half mad,--the next sad and melancholy. No matter! Its truth and simplicity are its sole recommendations.

If you are disappearing from yourself, but you're still writing, then there is a kind of activity of thinking going on, which in my world is similar to what's going on in music.

If I'm feeling that I have an angle or something to say or something where in a way I'm having a conversation with myself, that's immensely pleasurable.

If I write what my soul thinks it will be visible, and the words will be its body.

A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

Our secret thoughts - do they ever show up? The small flame of our soul can be burning hot, but no one comes to its warmth. Passersby see only a small whiff going through the chimney. Don't we need to take care of that flame, cherish it and patiently wait until someone will come and sit at it, do we?

The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.

Look, then, into thine heart, and write! Yes, into Life's deep stream! All forms of sorrow and delight, All solemn Voices of the Night, That can soothe thee, or affright, - Be these henceforth thy theme. (excerpt from "Voices of the Night")