Helen Vendler Quotes

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it.

I relate to most of the characters I play, because I do feel like an outsider.

I can't consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

I need my 'art work' or 'entertainment work' or whatever to have empathy for or connection to the way I experience the world as a person.

I would hope that people, no matter what age, would find something to identify with in my books, pick one up and experience a personal sense of discovery. That's great. But for them, not for me.

Anything I've not experienced I do not look to for a subject. I have to feel it.

American readers are so polite; their reactions make it seem like I've received thousands of thank-you notes. It's just lovely, and amazing the things people tell you that have touched them and related to their own lives.

I think each person you play has a little bit of you in it - you can't really help that.

Generally, if I read something that I think is really good and that I feel a connection with and is right for me, I see and hear who the guy is, as manifested by me.

There's a little bit of me in everybody that I play.

Every single character I've ever played has a little bit of me in them just because every single human in the world has a little bit of everything in them.

My narrative style centers around intimate, highly subjective depictions of personal experience and internal landscapes. In 'March,' everything fell into place as soon as I began identifying strongly with John Lewis as a young boy and saw how we shared the same kind of gravity and intensity as youngsters.

If I want people to connect to my words and my stories, I need to tell them where they came from. Because then, when you break into song, they have kind of a blueprint for why I wrote that song, so they can come to it with something they went through that helps them connect to it.

Mostly everything I've ever sung comes from a personal place.

I do not believe that with a fictional character you can force yourself too far away from yourself. There has to be some of you in it.

My songwriting is personal in the hope that listeners will know that I relate to them.

Writing from a personal experience can bring about this emotion and power of emotion that can be instantly connected to the instrument, my voice.

I don't think I could write about something I've never experienced or felt; all my songs are about things I've been through.

What I have that's special in my music is substance. It's music that people can really relate to. I know I'm gonna rap something that somebody has already been through in their life, something that they will understand.

I think the music that speaks to me the most is music that is personal. And that's the music that I'm trying to make.

Music can inspire immediate emotional reactions, even if the only person who hears it is the person creating it.

You relate to a character and you find that character within yourself. It's all parts of me. I don't leave characters behind. I just let them go.

I always wanted to kind of make the listener feel like it was them that I was talking about, or to the point that I could say the rhyme, and feel like it's them saying it.

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

Man, that's the only kind of book I like – one that's so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.