Grace Paley Quotes

Dip your pen into your arteries and write.

I think what it was is that Tupac was extremely passionate, very honest and raw in his approach to communicating. He understood communicating. And I think he just did it from a deep place within.

Write what you’re scared about.

All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts.

Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable - like I'm about to cry any second - and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.

When you're on stage, unless you surrender to the moment, you're not telling the truth. I look for people that tell me the truth.

Write as if you were dying.

The books I like to read the most feel like they've been written by somebody who had to write them or go crazy. They had to get them out of their heads. I like that kind of urgency.

If you don't have a certain amount of stage fright, then it's not going to be that interesting. It's not going to have the inner vibration. I think screen work needs inner vibration.

I am excited to show people how, when you get older, you get deeper, you get more raw, you get more honest, and you stop pretending to be the person you think people want you to be. I stopped worrying about what people wanted me to say and just sort of dug deep into my personal arsenal of my mistakes and shameful thoughts.

I just sing what I feel in my heart. I ain't trying to prove nothing, and I don't think I ever did.

I never try and tune anything out. I think that's a mistake. You want to bring all the honest stuff that's going on inside you into your work. Otherwise, you're keeping a lot of authenticity out.

I write about things and put things into my albums that I don't talk to people about. I don't hold back or sugarcoat anything.

Most writers write from their own experiences. That is where the honesty and intensity of emotions come from.

I think honesty is an important thing when writing a song. If you can't sing it with conviction, then no-one else is going to believe it.

In terms of sound, it's nothing huge, but when it comes to passion, The Tallest Man on Earth can be spotted from miles away.

As an artist, I want it to be so simple that anyone can understand it. No matter what age you are, you're going to feel it because it's real. I don't like to sugar coat. There's not too many artists that can tell stories and be vulnerable on the mic.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you've been told.

I tend to lose myself in the moment. I’m not very good at holding back. I don’t know how to do this without feeling everything. My emotions are the tool I use to perform.

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty.

My devils and angels, fears and hopes, insights and stupidities, loves and loathings, are what they are. I don't edit them out so much as try to make them interesting - whether I am talking to you, or writing a poem, or joking with my kids, or speaking on television.

There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays

The idea for each of the stories in this book came in a moment of belief and was written in a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, however, and the fear of failure is a long way from the worst of them. The worst - for me, at least - is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything that I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky.