Writing as Healing Quotes

I write for myself. It's therapy.

A lot of banging in the head has built up over the decades, and for my own sanity, I needed to write. I wanted to see if I could tell an honest, organic story about characters that interest me.

I just write about what makes me sad, and then when I write, I hear myself. It's like therapy, where I write something sad and then I make it happier or hopeful.

Everybody has to write out of rage sometimes.

When you're a writer and something difficult happens to you, one of the things involved in that is this emergence of narrative potential. And there's then a kind of self-consciousness about telling a story in which you suffered.

Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go, 'Oh, that's what this is all about,' and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.

All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. It's kind of self-therapy.

My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.

In my personal life, dark material is kind of an emptying out - it leaves more room for light. If I'm writing a particularly awful scene, something is released in the process.

If I didn't write my soul would dry up and die.

My best writing has to do with an internal process that I'm working out unconsciously and put into my characters.

I was always writing for myself. I wrote what I needed to write and hear - that's what makes it powerful.

I don't exorcise anything with my writing. I'm sure people do, but I don't.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.