Intimate Reflection Quotes

An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

I'm sometimes mystified by people who keep diaries. I never thought of my existence as being that important.

I'm just writing songs about how I feel or about how people I know feel.

Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.

When we gaze into the eyes of our beloved, we're staring into the eyes of a sacred mirror, and we recognize our oneness.

Honestly, 'Side A' is supposed to be a project just from my heart and whatever is happening in my heart at the time, and I want 'Side B' to also fit that same thing.

Not everyone's really got the heart to talk about what's going on with their love in their music.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

Any human being has private thoughts.

Most of the time, the lyrics are kind of like my secret messages to my friends or my boyfriend or my mom or my dad. I would never tell them that these songs are about them or which specific lyric is about somebody. Often, when I sit down to write a lyric, it is in the heat of the moment, and something has just happened.

Piano symbolizes interiority.

Somebody said to me, 'You should keep a journal of this period in your life and really write down this stuff.' But that makes me a little uneasy.

I remember keeping a lot of journals and diaries and trying to form a complete thought just based off of those immediate, raw feelings. If anything, I was conscious about how I just always wanted to be as honest as possible, no matter how vulnerable it would make me seem.

As a stand up, and often in acting, there is no place for the most intense feelings. Rage, genuine sorrow, naked hope... These things don't fit on a comedy stage and if you act you'll get to express them once in a while. Music is a place for the intensely personal.

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

This 'Making Mirrors' album is far more personal, even if there's a character element to the sounds I'm working with. Every song on this album I stand behind; I feel like I have a close relationship with them. There are older songs where I can feel myself writing a story, so this is the first album where I'm proud of every lyric.'

The only thing you can really say in a poem is what you really, really deeply believe.

I'm just coming from a more personal - and, I guess, more nostalgic - point of view.

I was inspired by Solange's album, 'A Seat At The Table,' from the moment that I heard it. She has clearly taken the time to create a unique body of work and emote through her music from a true place.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

Man is the only creature whose emotions are entangled with his memory.

It's a really personal thing for me to write a song.

There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.

The Smiths was an incredibly personal thing to me. It was like launching your own diary to music.