Kate Braverman Quotes

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings.

Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

I love when I'm writing and I'm cringing because I know I'm doing something right.

Usually I write about what I care about, which is a weakness but I think also a strength.

I started to feel songwriting was pulling different pieces of my heart out - the more I started writing, the more there was honesty.

All of my favorite artists who inspired me were never afraid to be uncool and never afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves - no matter how much flak they took for it.

A lot of what I write is very personal.

'Crush' is probably the most honest project I've ever written. It's my voice.

I don't write about anything I haven't been through.

It's always been a mantra to me, when making music or creating art, that you have to be vulnerable.

Any real piece of writing is an act of courage.

As a writer, I always peel back the layers, go to the most sensitive places uncomfortably close to the heart.

I think that writing is a process that tells you what you think. You sometimes actually don't know what your opinion is until you hear yourself trying to piece it out and have it make sense to you. The process itself is so bizarre and mysterious that you never know what it's going to tell you.

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public

The most important thing is to write in your own blood. I bare intimate feelings because people should know how other people feel.

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.

art is exposure. And until you've developed a degree of maturity to handle that knowledge, you are revealing what other people keep hidden.

I love things that are brave enough to be nakedly about what our lives are actually built of, when you're wild about someone, or you love something, or you're a fool, or you embarrass yourself. And I don't think the answer is cynicism. Cynicism is not the cure for sentimentality. Cynicism is its own form of sentimentality. For example, I tried to watch Breaking Bad. After three episodes, I thought, I don't like this guy. I don't care about him. But you can see why people tell themselves that they think this is real. But real doesn't mean bad.

In my opinion, trying to guess what readers want is the wrong approach. You have to tell your story as best you can and as true to yourself as possible. You have to be honest and fair and vulnerable and foolish and brave, and not care what anyone thinks of it.

Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk without self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.

Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

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.