Lynn Coady Quotes

I am always writing to myself.

It's really about living in your head... just looking out at the world, then going back into your head and tossing around a lot of ideas and coming out with something interesting to say.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

I think a lot of people in their average day actually imagine two sides of a conversation at one point or another. I think that the mental trick of holding two sides of a conversation in your head is actually something that we all do.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

I've always relied a lot on landscape in my books, the atmosphere of a particular place, as well as a fair amount of external action. While writing 'Chance,' it occurred to me that this is the most internal book I've ever written. So much of the action takes place in Chance's head.

Writing is essentially an internal process.

It's very easy for a writer to spend much too much time in her head.

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 think, as a writer, I'm in my own head.

I'm self-entertaining. My dialogue is with myself.

One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.

A writer needs a life of introspection.

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

I can't turn off the way I think, and that's essentially who I am, who anybody is.

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

I was an only child with a lot of time to kill. I suspect a lot of writers are only children, or only children become writers because it's a way of being alone.

I am in my own head most of the time.

The most real dialogue for me is when I am alone, writing.

Writing is a way of drifting within my own mind: almost a solitary process, so to speak.

I have always been very interested in thinking deeply about things. I do this a lot.

A big reason I'd spent my career as a writer and not a public speaker is that I am a person who refines my worldview in a silent room, waiting for my thoughts to arrange themselves on the screen before me.

'Sally' is just a song that I wrote talking to my alter ego. When I write, I don't really consciously say, 'This is what I've been going through in my life, and I'm gonna put this into words.' It's just a song that I kinda went in and did. Then, listening back to it, I realized, 'I'm talking to myself.'