life influences Quotes

In my life the most influential people are people who are sort of brought to me, as opposed to people I seek out.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

As I always have with stand-up or anything, you kind of draw on what you're going through in your life.

Everything in life influences my music.

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

Your whole life informs your eye.

The fabric of my life is under my skin; [but] it's definitely not something that comes up in a conscious way when I read material. I have an incredible relationship with my mom, so I'm fascinated by mothers who do not have that. But I've never done anything that resembled my life. People always jump to that conclusion, and I wish life were that simple, but it's not.

Without fail, the first question I am asked at any author event is, 'Are your books based on your real life?'

I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.

I think bringing depth to characters means really needing to find out who this girl is, what is she passionate about, what makes her tick, what gets her going in life. So I did a lot of backstory for who she was and sometimes it comes across screen and sometimes it doesn't. You never know, because you're not the director, but you can only do your work and hope that it somehow subtly is infiltrated in that. But I think the characters I've played for the most part have depth, just not in the way that you think they do.

But in the life of every man there are influences of a far more real and penetrating character than those which come through the medium of schools or teachers.

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.

I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!

I love the idea of real-life experiences finding their way into fiction. I think that's really cool.

I said earlier that I do not believe an artist's life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.

I've lived through a lot of dark environments one way or another while growing up and that has influenced my songwriting.

My early life has given me a great deal to draw on, certainly - but would I have swapped a happy childhood for the writing? Yes.

Your life can become the background for the art you create.

There are a lot of people from my Central Arkansas days that I owe a lot of thanks to for how they helped me over the years.

Law school and summer camp are the two experiences that inform pretty much all I do.

All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.

I always draw from things around me that people around me have gone through... The story that could be taken really literally is not from my life exactly. But bits and pieces are, and the sentiment behind it is.

So much of my own life inspires what I write. Whether it's work, family, friends, motherhood, I am a writer who tends to write what she knows. In 'Revenge Wears Prada,' a great deal of my own life finds its way into the book.

The artist is a combination of what's happened to them in their lives and how it's filtered through the way they think. That's what makes me different than Samantha Brown or Anthony Bourdain.