Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

My life is my message.

For me, writing is an experience. It's an exercise in which I want to discover myself by taking my characters to the edges of human experience, to the edges of themselves and then, asking certain questions - about love, what does it mean to love? What's beauty? What is true beauty? What does it mean to be insane - crazy?

I write because I know that one day I will die, and thus I should experience as many deliberate observations, careful thoughts, wild ideas, and deep emotions as I can before that day occurs.

You pursue what you love, and if you find beauty or truth, you go with that.

That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something.

I decided to write books, just to prove to myself that I was still alive, if nothing else.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

I want to explore more sides of humanity and myself. That's what acting is about.

In high school, I went to a place called the Mountain School. It's on a farm in Vermont, and I read Emerson and Thoreau and ran around the woods. Now I go hiking with a bunch of my comedy buddies. We talk about our emotions. I also do a lot of writing on hikes, just to get the blood flowing and the ideas moving.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

Art is about expressing the true nature of the human spirit in whatever way one wishes to express it. If it is honest, it is beautiful. If it is not honest, it is obvious.

The real existential challenge is to live up to your fullest potential, along with living up to your intense sense of responsibility and to be honest to yourself about what you want.

Thinking about death makes you analyse what life is. Anxiety makes you curious, and curiosity leads to understanding. I wouldn't be a writer without depression.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

Remember this always: The living of your own life writes the book of your most sacred truth, and offers evidence of it.

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity.

Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.

Can you every single day tell a true testimony of who you are? That's really what life is about.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

Writing does not exclude the full life; it demands it.

I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

Though the universe is delightfully complex, life, at its heart, is not particularly complicated. Live true to who you are and though it won't always be easy, you'll live well.

I have always thought of poetry as an act of celebration. Just by nature of writing a poem you are taking the time to dwell on whatever it is that you're writing about...you can be celebrating anger, you can be celebrating sorrow... you are spending the time to focus and observe and try to understand the various parts of being human.

The four rules of writing... 1. Write to discover. 2. There is no greater discovery than love. 3. All love comes from the Creator. 4. Write what you will.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.