Confessional Writing Quotes

#1. One of the problems with a lot of "confessional" writing is that it starts and stops with the confessional and doesn't really tie the "I" into a "we" at all. I'm still surprised at how mad critics get at that kind of confessional writing.

Kiese Laymon

#2. There are certain people that you don't have to even work at extracting their inner life. It is just there and they're happy to share it with you.

Carol Friedman

#3. Only when I was singing did I feel loved.

Maria Callas

#4. For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

Taylor Swift

#5. I've been writing a lot about a new form of Russian imperialism. Actually, Russian Orthodox imperialism. It's very little remarked that the cement, the political, ideological cement of the Russian regime now, communism having collapsed and imploded, is increasingly a confessional one.

Christopher Hitchens

#6. The Christian religion is so manifestly contrary to the facts, belief in it can only be held with the most delusional gerrymandering imaginable.

Richard Carrier

#7. A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

John Irving

#8. When I think of the Olympics I only think of good things. I think of what a great event it is and what it has done for me and my career, and changed my personal life, too.

Roger Federer

#9. Livvy held up a hand. In Emma's defense, Cameron's annoying, but he's hot.

Cassandra Clare

#10. A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.

Nelson Algren

#11. Generally speaking, the less privileged groups in democratic society, as they become aware of their interests and their political power, will be found to press for ever more state intervention in practically all fields.

Gunnar Myrdal

#12. I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.

John Darnielle

#13. It's our nature: Human beings like success but they hate successful people.

Carrot Top

#14. I long for the day I no longer long for him.

Franki Fiori

#15. I read 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race' and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer's ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.

Nic Pizzolatto

#16. There is no short cut to acheivement.

George Washington Carver

#17. Don't mourn me", he said. Because it was a joke, a sick joke and because - at the end - he needed a little dark humour to sustain him.

Stephen Lloyd Jones

#18. Yeah, it's disturbing when someone has no self-awareness.

Mike White

#19. Build yourself a book-nest to forget the world without.

Abraham Cowley

#20. He had the kind of smile that inhabited every part of his face
his eyes, his cheeks; there was even a dimple.

Kristin Hannah

#21. One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

John Irving

#22. My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.

Michael Pollan

#23. It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.

Thomas Pynchon