Emotional Reflection Quotes

When they told me I had to have a heart operation, my main memory is standing in my kitchen and thinking what I would really miss was my little tea towel. Not for one minute did I think, 'Oh, I'm going to really miss performing.' The things you're going to miss are your wife, your egg cup, your seat that you sit in to watch TV.

That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

Every album I've made is about what I'm experiencing at the time.

With songwriting I spend a lot of time living life, accruing all these experiences, journaling, and then by the time I get to the studio I'm teeming with the drive to write.

Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a picture book, a speech or anything, really, it has so much to do with what I'm going through personally or a problem I'm trying to work out. When I wrote my novel 'Baby,' my three children had all just gone out the door.

I use everything. Turning life into stories is how I make sense of my experience. No matter how weird or disturbing or upsetting to me personally, it all finds its way in there.

A game is like a mirror that allows you to look at yourself.

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

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.

Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.

Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean.

I cry whenever I watch an emotional scene that I did, just because it brings me back to that moment. It's like, I remember being there; I remember feeling what I felt. It's really weird, right?

Typically I go in the studio and whatever I'm contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I don't come in with lyrics... I just go in and let it happen.

A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom--all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had.

You can't hate/love others without loving/hating yourself first.

I had a dream, in 1985, I believe, when a friend I'd gone to school with was sick - one of the first people I knew who'd gotten the AIDS virus. I had a dream of him in his bedroom with an angel crashing through the ceiling. I wrote a poem called 'Angels in America.' I've never looked at the poem since the day I wrote it.

If only we could lean over the soul we love and see as in a mirror the image we cast!

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

You end up becoming someone you see in the eyes of those you love.

The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time.

When I see daughters with their fathers I wonder what that would be like, although not in a way that immobilises me.

Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.

I want to make a poem of my life.

When I'm writing, I need to amplify my thoughts and feelings on just a conversation that I might have had with somebody - somebody close to me. It's often the case that the people closest to me are the people on my mind the most.

When you write, no matter what, it ends up personal.