Nicole Krauss Quotes

I think in real life most of us don't know how to communicate our deepest feelings very well.

People in day-to-day life tend to skim the surface of things and be polite and careful, and that's not the language I speak. I like talking about feelings, fears and memories, anguish and joy, and I find it in music.

I think I've always been aware of it with my music. I think growing up basically and having a lot to deal with and just slowing down and having something to say and something to retract from, I think I just knew that what I was doing was extremely honest.

The greater your capacity to love, the greater your capacity to feel the pain.

Acting for me is finding those things that, finding the strings of humanity that tie us all together. And you only find that by living life and loving and breaking up.

I think that creative work, music in particular, is a conveyor of inner emotional life. I don't feel one way all the time, so I don't want my music to feel the same way all the time.

A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.

I think I've lived a pretty hard life. What I mean by hard is that... I've been kind of reckless with things. I'm a passionate person. I'm a super passionate person. I think there's definitely been sorrow in my life, good and bad. I think it comes through. I hope it comes through in my writing because to me that's what artistry is.

I think you find universal truth when you get really honest with yourself and you can reach people. If you go deep enough, you have that core feeling, and that feeling can transcend the details of your experience.

I guess I have a talent for humiliation, a place within me that experience can't reach, which is terrible in real life but something that comes in handy in writing. It seems as though humiliation has become a career for me.

My comedy notebooks are filled with random journal entries. It's all the same. I can look back on old joke notebooks, and know exactly what was going on in my life.

I am so enriched because so much has happened in my life. The way I can express myself is because of the life I have led. It's only when you experience life can you emote it.

I always thought on my own that what is a huge part of being an actor, or what made me a better actor, was just really living life. Not being closed in on life, but being more open to experiences and to people and taking risks and exposing yourself to things.

I live my life pretty emotionally, for better and for worse. I'm pretty thin-skinned and transparent. I lead with my heart, and I wanted to make a movie that did the same.

Everything I've written has been personal and touched on things that I needed to deal with in my personal life. So I just feel that writing is great therapy, and the best writing comes from truth, and so I mine my life constantly for that.

My music - that's the one area I won't let myself be pushed around. But in other parts of my life, I'm a confused mess.

The best writing really does come from the deepest, most private part of you.

My heart is mysteriously alive in the world of sounds - a totally different dimension from the daily life.

You wonder why I only talk about my personal life. But that's all I've ever done.

You can only love and be loved to the extent that you know and are known by somebody.

I don't need to manufacture trauma in my life to be creative. I have a big enough reservoir of sadness or emotional trauma to last me.

We all know about love, faith, sadness, despair, hope, hopelessness, longing, desire... those are things we all have inside of us, and that's what my songs are about... what it means to be a human being.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

I write to music, and Nina Simone is always on my playlist to write to. I mean, she's inspiring. She's truthful and real and raw.

We're all dealt with the same hand here, so to speak. I feel like I've had it a lot better than most people. I've had the opportunity to travel and play music all my life.