Individual Voice Quotes

Writing is extremely personal, and that's the joy of it for me.

I was like, 'I have to start writing for myself, to show people what I can do and what my point of view is.'

Being an artist is a way of saying, I am here, and this is what I stand for.

If people are not listening to you as individuals, it's always good to get together and make a stand for something.

I think writing is a much more personal thing.

Do not write to impress others. Authors who write to impress people have difficulty remaining true to themselves. A better path is to write what pleases you and pray that there are others like you. Your first and most important reader is you. If you write a book that pleases you, at least you know one person will like it.

That's what the Senate is about. It's the last bastion of minority rights, where a minority can be heard, where a minority can stand on its feet, one individual if necessary, and speak until he falls into the dust.

I think it has as much to do with honoring my own voice as it does with feeling a responsibility to my readers or my daughters.

Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

I'm not trying to explain other cultures, or to give a fair and balanced account of a country, or the top ten things you need to know. I'm not trying to spread world peace and understanding. I'm not an advocate or an activist or an educator or a journalist. I'm out there trying to tell stories the best I can.

Write the poem only you can write.

We have to give our opinion, we have to say something, or we are a part of it. As an artist I am forced to say something.

It is the individual voice, present to itself, that needs to be heard. We need to hear the process of the musician working on himself. We don't need to hear who is more clever with synthesizers. Our cleverness has created the world we live in, which in many ways, we're sorry about.

Without the gods, how would I sing?' I asked. With your own voice,' he said.

Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others

Believe in the power of your own voice. The more noise you make, the more accountability you demand from your leaders, the more our world will change for the better.

If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagiarize or take 'on loan'. There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall.

I decided early on, very early, that the best role I could play is to speak in my own voice, assume my own voice and my own ideas. Even if you support a candidate who ultimately wins, what you say and do is seen through the filter of that candidate.

If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.

Believe in the power of your own voice.

Somebody out there was trying to use my language and trying to speak for me. Rather than have that happen, I thought I'd do it myself. It's a fun thing. It's a way for fans to connect.

The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.

As an artist, everybody has the opportunity to celebrate and speak their truth.

Every user has something to say.

I don't think special attention should be given to an actor or a singer or a baseball player or a soccer player more than anyone else, but they do have an opinion like anyone else.