Caroline Leavitt Quotes

I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.

You'd like to know me well, but I've got things inside my head that even I can't face.

The characters I write about are very internal.

There are parts of me that I keep secret even from myself. I have demons and I'd love to be able to healthily look at the demons and still be a wonderful actor and not feel I need them to create.

Whenever you're writing something that's reflective, you have to put yourself through some sort of ordeal just to understand the way you're feeling.

I've had quite a lot to conquer in myself apart from writing. Not that I've been a pure angel when I come to the end of it.

I am always writing to myself.

A lot of the time, I write in the third person, but I'm mostly describing my own ordeals. When those unsettled struggles prey on your mind, you become haunted. To get free, you must defeat your ghosts.

In life, there's a ladder sometimes, and maybe at the top, there's a mirror. You take a step up, then maybe three steps down... just because you don't want to face the decloaking in the mirror.

As a songwriter, I was always mining my own depths, which were filled with confusion and darkness.

That's the bulk of my lyrical output - being confused and trying to find answers to my confusion.

There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped.

It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.

What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.

It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world.

In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.

In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.

People tell me it's a sin, to know and feel too much within.

The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.

The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.

Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth inside out into the light.

He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.

Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!