Anne Enright Quotes

Writing is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time. The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and writing some more can help you control issues that you face.

There's no better way to process pain than to write.

I think and write whenever I want an outlet.

When I was young, I would just write poems into textbooks in class. Everybody needs that outlet. For me, I think it's less about learning about myself and more about just needing to get things out sometimes.

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.

At this point in my life, I'm probably not gonna be able to stop writing because it's gonna help me be able to do what I need to do.

We all have an escape. Mine was theater.

You can punch a wall or write a song. Just as painful either way, but you have something to show for it at the end of the day with a song.

I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.

Music was my one way to vent.

People think my work is therapeutic. I don't see it that way. It's not like I'm saving money from a weekly therapy visit by writing down my life.

If I couldn't get published tomorrow I'd still be writing. It's something to do with feeling so overwhelmed by this experience of life that you have to tell someone about it, and in a way that reorders the experience to make it manageable.

I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books.

I start with something that makes me angry or confused, and then I write about it. It's a form of self-help.

Generally, all my life, I have had strong friction with life - I was a problematic soldier, I was kicked out of the army, I was in fights. There was something about writing that was a way of experimenting with this emotion.

I don't have to lay on the couch and see a therapist because my therapist is in my paint brushes.

Writing for me is definitely a form of ventilation - a way for me to cope and deal with emotions. I think it is for any writer.

Writing helps me process things that are happening to me.

For me, acting was a way of taking destructive energy and doing something productive with it, and in that way it was quite a life saver.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

I feel like if I couldn't write, I would explode.

Writing is how I stay sane. It's completely necessary.

I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.

I was going mad. One day, I just started writing, and it was like therapy because I was in a position where I couldn't rage. I never expected to be a writer; it's a different world than I ever expected to be in.

When I get depressed, I try to get something for the terrible sadness that comes over me and create something in terms of poetry.