Larry Gelbart Quotes

If you are disappearing from yourself, but you're still writing, then there is a kind of activity of thinking going on, which in my world is similar to what's going on in music.

I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

Writers don't write to inform other people, they write to find out something themselves.

I make art to figure out what I'm thinking, not to tell people what I think.

I think that writing is a process that tells you what you think. You sometimes actually don't know what your opinion is until you hear yourself trying to piece it out and have it make sense to you. The process itself is so bizarre and mysterious that you never know what it's going to tell you.

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.

I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

I write to find out what I think.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery....I write to find out what I'm thinking about.

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.

I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: "I look at what I write so I can see what I think."

All my songs are where I am.

If you want to express yourself, you need the services of a lover or a psychiatrist; if you want to express a book, you might conceivably manage it.

People think my work is therapeutic. I don't see it that way. It's not like I'm saving money from a weekly therapy visit by writing down my life.

The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me.

I wrote songs when I was little, and I wrote a journal, but I don't think I knew how to let that truth come out yet.

I need all of my songs while I'm writing them, because I need to get the stuff out of my body and out of my brain. I write out of necessity, not because I want to be a pop star.

You have to write about what's inside you. If I have to get something out, I'll do it.

Music is my form of cleansing and introspection, so I have to grow in order to accomplish it.

My only way of processing anything for me is by writing.

During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew.

I don't have an audience in mind when I write. I'm writing mainly for myself. After a long devotion to playwriting I have a good inner ear. I know pretty well how a thing is going to sound on the stage, and how it will play. I write to satisfy this inner ear and its perceptions. That's the audience I write for.

I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.