Personal Storytelling Quotes

I feel like 'Work' was a really good song for people to get to know me, as it's obviously biographical. With 'Bounce,' I wanted to make sure people know there's a fun side to me as well as the somber and serious one.

If you're going to write a memoir, try to be as honest and open as you can.

Studios weren't banging on my door to offer me parts... And I thought, well how am I ever going to make movies that speak to my heart and to my values?

You can't write something actively trying to please everyone - you're going to end up with watery soup that way. You just have to write stories you would want to read and hope that people like them.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

With 'Girls,' I have been able to plug into almost everything I've felt that's personal and sensitive.

The stuff I write isn't strictly autobiographical, but it's personal, if that makes any sense. It draws all these little incidents and people out of my life and then contorts them.

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way.

My comedy is unapologetic and fearless. Like, sometimes you'll wind up having condomless sex with someone that you probably shouldn't. I'm interested in sharing that part of myself unapologetically so that other people will hopefully feel better.

I just wanted to be a good comic and had no sense of show business, but at some point you want the opportunity to write a show about your life.

When you have an actor on set who is playing themselves in a movie that is about the most cathartic, most traumatizing event of their lives, you don't even have to mention that.

It's extremely important for women to be writing their own stories and giving them to people to really be emotionally impacted by

With my music, I can express myself so much. A lot of the fans can sense that I'm relating to them something that's quite personal.

Rather than thinking in terms of a specific genre or specific kind of thing, I hope I can just stay relatively small and keep making my movies. If I can keep writing them and making them, I'll be happy.

A lot of Gorillaz songs were very personal. I mean, that's why it was interesting, because it wasn't music being made for a cartoon. It was something different. It was a much more emotional affair. I wasn't necessarily thinking in the third-person then.

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

...I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.

I've always appreciated people like Graham Parker or Loudon Wainwright III, who spend their entire lives writing songs and working their asses off just to have complete artistic freedom. They're just sharing their lives with you through their music. That's the same kind of work that I'm trying to do, in my own weird way.

I take the most wrenchingly painful moments of my life, brush them off and present them for the amusement of others. Luckily for me, my childhood was torture.

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

I tell a story, and therefore I exist.

I may not get the opportunity to make movies for my whole life, but I'm going to make movies for the rest of my life. Maybe studios won't pay for it, but I'm going to do it because I love it. So, I just have to be proud of what I make, and what I'm trying to say in what I make. If people don't like it or people don't see it, that's beyond what I can control. I'm a storyteller, and people are going to listen or not and like it or not. That's only solidified over time.

I think it is more important to tell a story rather than follow any trend; that is a less bold way to go. If you do that [follow trends] you are just trying to ride on the coat tails of someone else's success.

Taylor is a musician who does things under her own name and tells her own stories-her songs and her albums are her.