Written Reflection Quotes

It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled thoughts that clutter my mind and bookshelves, then maybe I can explain what happened. Maybe the worlds I have inhabited for the past seven years will assume order and logic and wholeness on paper. Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else.

I can only speak for myself and my own music, because that is what I am most familiar with, and I write about things that I am living or experiencing.

I've had a series of setbacks in my life, which I've written about.

I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing. One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence. ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs.

Books have always helped me make sense of things. With any life experience, you can find someone who has documented it in a poetic way.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.

There is something magical about putting a problem in writing. It is almost as though by writing about what is wrong, you start to discover new ways of making it right.

Writing is a way of life. I do it because it's a way of experiencing the world, and trying to come to terms with it and understand it and express it and engage with it. And to me it's a natural extension of reading.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there - that of the pulse, the heart beat.

My music is about my life. If it's something that I've lived, then it's something that I've written about.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

Most things I go through I have to write about.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

I haven't read for pleasure in 35 years. I mean, I get a lot of pleasure from what I read... For me, it's gotten so that it doesn't seem as though I've read a book unless I've written about it. It really seems the completion of the reading process.