Alice Weaver Flaherty Quotes

If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

I go through a lot of depression, and I know other people do, too, but I have an outlet that so many people don't. If you have that inside of you and can't get it out, what do you do?

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

I do these records. All of these ideas that I have, that I put out there, that inspire me to write, are a purging in a lot of ways. I have to expel them in order for myself to walk around and actually smile and be a regular, or a living, person.

I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.

I cut a hole in my heart and wrote with the blood.

I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.

It's people who write music because they are obsessed that I like; because they have something to say and no other way to say it.

Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.

I spend my whole life trying to put up a front to prevent people from seeing certain parts of me. Weirdly, when I go to write, I feel like I have to expose it, almost compulsively.

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me. I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear; my courage is reborn. But, and that is the great question, will I ever be able to write anything great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?

I wanted to be a singer, of course, but there was something about the songwriting, then and now, that is the most important thing. It's how I express myself, how I express how I see things. When I see people struggling with emotions and feelings and don't know how to put it down, I'm able to do that. It's really like a therapy, and it's like a buddy and a friend. It's a way out of a lot of things.

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

I got a damn good mind to write a book about all the feelings that I have inside about all these things that happened in our life that we're making happen and letting it happen when it shouldn't be happening.

When I write I like to just say everything that people think about but never express vocally. I just get deep into it; I'm a bit obsessive about music.

The word 'confession,' to me, means needing to be absolved. I'm not asking for forgiveness. I'm not asking people to understand. I'd like to think that I tell stories and sometimes my life weaves through it.

The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.

I feel like if writers used writing as therapy we'd have a ton of happy writers.

I think you often have that sense when you write--that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.

Writing is a strong easement for perplexity. My life is a map, spread out with all the rivers and hills showing.

A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

When I say the people around me, I mean the prisoners, the guards.