Helen Garner Quotes

There have been times in my life when I felt compelled to write things down as a matter of therapy, but whatever I kept about those days, I shredded. It was too personal.

There's something about taking emotional and career and relationship humiliations, writing them, acting them out again, but then redeeming them in some way.

One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.

The more vulnerable and the more confused the song is, the equal and opposite effect is how I feel after having written it.

Most things I go through I have to write about.

I didn't have to say it. I just had to write it. It was painful enough.

I tend to write it and then let go emotionally.

I started writing to save my life.

I've always been one of those people that, if I am angry, I just hold it in. And I always kind of, like, wrote it in a song and put it aside for myself because it helps me get it out. It's almost like exercising; it's almost like that for me.

For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.

My love songs are very personal and quite weird. They don't really have the big radio hit choruses because basically they're my therapy, stuff I have to get off my chest.

Writing for me is definitely a form of ventilation - a way for me to cope and deal with emotions. I think it is for any writer.

Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.

Writing is my therapy. My feelings build up inside of me and then I sit down and write a song.

It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

I always wrote. I wrote from when I was 12. That was therapeutic for me in those days. I wrote things to get them out of feeling them, and onto paper. So writing in a way saved me, kept me company. I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know.

I was going mad. One day, I just started writing, and it was like therapy because I was in a position where I couldn't rage. I never expected to be a writer; it's a different world than I ever expected to be in.

I just feel very lucky to be able to write fiction because I think, otherwise, I would have had to spend a fortune on a psychiatrist - and I still wouldn't get 1/100th of what I get writing fiction.

I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.

In some ways, in 'The Queen of the Night,' I'm writing about some of the experience that I had with 'Edinburgh' where I was entirely unable to speak about what had happened to me as a child, but I could read from the novel.

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.

I write about what is getting to me at the time, about the things you need to talk about, but which would sound silly if you sat down and told them to your friend. I only write for myself, to get my emotions out. It's self-therapeutic.

I was writing for myself, not to be published. I was writing diaries, even letters, to myself or to anyone I was angry at. Sometimes they weren't to a person, they were just to the universe - a bit like penning daydreams or isolated thoughts.

So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

I do find it therapeutic, writing about stuff that was frightening and painful as a child, and managing to see it from an adult's point of view. To get it out of the closet onto paper, metaphorically speaking, is therapeutic.