Cathartic Expression Quotes

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

Every book for me is an exorcism in some way or another, working through my feelings at the time.

The world’s a better place since I chose music. I like the physical aspect of it, the volume and the intensity of it. It’s loud and hard. I like all that because inside me I feel like screaming.

Always write angry letters to your enemies. Never mail them.

Valentine's Day is devoted to love. Why don't we have a day devoted to hatred? The raw, visceral hatred that is felt every hour of the day by ordinary people, but is repressed for reasons of social order. I think it would be very cathartic, and it would certainly make for an exciting six o'clock news.

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.

I think if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the health they do. It seems to me they are suffering from repression.

When I sing or play music, I'm able to relieve myself of whatever it is that I'm struggling with.

It is interesting to note that the best periods of Italian Horror films came out of the Sixties, when Italy was enjoying a carnival period of phenomenal optimism, and the shadowy side surfaced with all of its attendant dark, beautiful, baroque, catholic symbolism.

Laughter isn't even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

I think actually singing the words is more therapeutic than just sitting down to write them, because then you are letting it out, and it's coming from your gut.

I used to believe my art had to be about the things that brought me joy and gave me hope. But I learned that art can be found in all of life, even in pain.

When I need to exorcise a demon, I grab whatever score is going to house the song I need to sing out of my system, and I sing it.

I've been in situations before where something was going on, and that's the only way you can kinda cope with it is to write about it.

The freedom of saying anything to him, telling all, relieved a burden I hadn't even realized I'd been carrying. In my relentless push to keep moving forward, there had been so many emotions I hadn't let myself inhabit fully, so many things I hadn't talked about. Now I couldn't quite catch up to myself.

In the immediate aftermath of the separation I just wrote and wrote and wrote. And wrote and wrote and wrote. Thank God I had that as an outlet.

I have a very healthy relationship to my work, and I find that if a scene is working, no matter how intense it is, you have the catharsis on screen, and you can let it go. I think it's, if at the end of the day you feel like you haven't cracked it, that's when you go home and it's more difficult to switch off.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

I tell people to write the stories that you're afraid to talk about, the stories you wish you'd forget, because those have the most power. Those are the ones that have the most strength when you give them as a testimony.

I prefer to channel my problems and inner demons through a character. Another persona. That protects me and my family. I can get my frustrations out that way.

Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.

Relief loosens tongues beyond measure.

Crying's always been a way for me to get things out which are buried deep, deep down. When I sing, I often cry. Crying is feeling, and feeling is being human.