Alice Sebold Quotes

I think, like, fiction has a place to understand those things that are hardest to understand that non-fiction can't ever get at.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

Technically, I'm not a guitar player, all I play is truth and emotion.

You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not just to depict life, or criticize it, but to actually make it alive.

Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.

We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.

Somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself.

When she came to write her story, she would wonder when the books and the words started to mean not just something, but everything.

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.

I've had frustrated storytelling juices that have been lying dormant for a long time, and I guess the documentary was a way of me telling a story that I felt most qualified to tell. And I loved it, and I'd love to do something else someday, probably more narrative-based. But I'm in no rush.

Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

I get some flak for and some resistance from colleagues for because I'm interested in storytelling. I mean what I like about songwriting is songs used to tell a story.

If I look at my own recordings, I think generally there is a focal point within the song and often it's the instrumental bridge or a guitar solo where we try to do something unexpected, something beautiful or weird, or beautiful because it is weird. And of course I fail half the time, but yes that is the goal, to create even a few seconds of bliss, or sadness. The electric guitar is a great instrument for doing this because it is capable of surprising you. There are so many different sounds available.

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

I’m not a brain surgeon, I’m not saving anyone from any life-threatening illnesses. But I get to tell stories, and that’s a pretty important task.

To me, a poem is almost like someone whispering to another person, or you hear the whispering in your head. I hope with my own poems that the reader feels a connection, soul to soul, that'll help us all feel a little less alone on the planet. And it does have the power to direct change. A writer can make the word 'dark' be something positive. You can relieve a word like 'hysterical' of its misogynistic implications. You can make the language your own. That's what poetry is about.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

The music takes over the words and makes them speak to me in another language.

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.

Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language

Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.