Lola Kirke Quotes

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

The thing with 'Lost Without You' is that for a long time I didn't feel like I could share it with people. When it came to releasing it, it was a cliff-diving moment.

It felt like a huge risk when I first started putting my comic online. It was very scary to put myself out there that way and to open up something that I cared about very dearly - and to be the only creator involved with it.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that's too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.

I sometimes have a horrible fear of turning up a canvas of mine. I'm always afraid of finding a monster in place of the precious jewels I thought I had put there!

The longer you work on something, the more you don't really want to know what the world is going to tell you.

There is always shame in the creation of an expressive work, whether it's a book or a clay pot. Every artist worries about how they will be seen by others through their work. When you create, you aspire to do justice to yourself, to remake yourself, and there is always the fear that you will expose the very thing that you hoped to transform.

I have turned away from the thought of writing fiction in the past through what I suppose is, actually, fear. The direct, raw invitation for the reader to come in and explore my imagination is fairly scary for me so I have busied myself with so much else.

Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.

I feel like one thing that a lot of creative people go through is that they feel like they don't have the right to be creative or to put their stuff out there. I'm glad that blogging from a young age kind of got that out of the way for me.

I am quite an insecure person, and I think that, like any director, if I'm asked about my vision for a piece, I feel very vulnerable.

A lot of artists are afraid to be themselves and afraid to tell people what it really is.

To be a great creator, you have to be vulnerable. You're creating characters that have a little bit of yourself in them... And you want to know it's a safe environment for that.

On many days, harder than the act of making the art itself is the act of sharing it and living in a culture that you know is built to tear you down.

My fear is if I expose myself, not so much that I'll be hurt, but that the reaction will be "Is that all there is? Is that the entirety of you? Because it's boring."

I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.

I have never had much confidence in my own work, and even now when I am assured (still much to my grateful surprise) that it has value for other people, I feel diffident, reluctant as it were to expose my world of imagination to possibly contemptuous eyes and ears.

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.

...that horrible moment of suspense when the artist shows one of his creations to strange eyes for the first time.

Your personal freedom to experience yourself and life as you wish is not being limited. Step into your choices and stop telling yourself that you can't, when what you really mean is that you don't want other people to feel the way you think that are going to feel when they see you making the choices you really want to make.

The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.

Like, in retrospect, this whole Mini-Album is about itself, and the process of letting go of the fear of what people will think about the music or of me or whatever and just putting it out there. But none of that was intentional at all.

We're [writers] all afraid of writing badly, and there are psychological reasons, like the bad interior of ourselves is somehow being revealed, but we all fear that, and you can't write well if you're not willing to write badly. That's why you have to make writing a habit, so it feels normal and not strange.

There's even more stuff that I'd like to release, but I'm scared to, that's really, um, nerdy... not nerdy in a good way. Like, silly.