Julia Holter Quotes

I don't set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it's about.

I don't control my writing - it controls me.

I'm an incredibly emotional person, but I always feel bad about that. The work is therapy... I need to emote wildly while I write. I weep. I'll laugh, get excited, and get up and pace. I try to take the emotional journey with the characters.

The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

When you write a story, it just flows and you don't control it. It's subconscious.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don't censor yourself, you end up with what you're most concerned about, but you haven't filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

I've always thought of myself as an organic writer, rather than a cerebral one. I feel my way along as I go, hoping I'll get to the place I intend to reach.

I don't work in a straight line. I don't write with an outline. I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together.

I sit down and I write what I'm thinking and what I feel - it happens all at once, I never stop writing.

I write totally spontaneously. I actually write fiction by hand - that always seems to startle people. I think the reason I do that is to bypass the thinking part of me and get to the more unconscious part, which is where all the good ideas seem to be.

My best writing has to do with an internal process that I'm working out unconsciously and put into my characters.

I'm an expert typist. I learned in high school. I would close my eyes and just type without worrying about mistakes. I tried to penetrate my heart, and as I let my thoughts drift, things bubbled up to the surface.

I'm not afraid of just cranking it out and seeing what comes out of my subconscious. Because I don't always know what I'm feeling. I do a lot of rewriting later. But that first blast feels like a spigot - like it's coming from somewhere else.

You just write and you don't try to make sense of it. You just put it down the way you got it.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

All my songs are where I am.

Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.

A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

I'm a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.

I tend to write it and then let go emotionally.

I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

You know what's weird, I just write to write, with no intention, I just write.

It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.