Alison Bechdel Quotes

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It's more 'thematically personal' - what's up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.

I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

The first record I spent five years writing and it was an amalgamation of all the things that happened in my life from the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty.

The more I do in my life, the more I can write music about new experiences.

I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.

Yes, all my songs come from personal experience and relationships.

I don't want real life necessarily to be seen only as a context to heighten the deepness my work.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

I write to be truthful in my songs, which is why I wrote what's painfully truthful about my life in my autobiography.

I'm just not that fascinating a person to have had all those lives that I've written about.

There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.

The things in my songs are the edited highlights of my life. I don't go seeking out strange sexual experiences every day of the week.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough?

I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.

I have been taking every step toward the future every day through making many paintings and sculptures with my deep emotion hidden in my life.

My act has always reflected what's going on in my life.

I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.

Inspiration for my music just comes from, you know, my life experiences.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.

The movies I've made at a certain time of my life were exactly right for the stage of my life, the frame of mind I was in at the time. Each character I've had to play has been me in that time in my life.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.