Writing About Myself Quotes

#1. What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

Toni Morrison

#2. If I'm not writing about myself, then I sit down with people I really dig writing with and throw 'em out and see if something sticks. Their brain plus mine hopefully will make something interesting and cool and it will just snowball and we'll have a unique song by the end of it.

Kacey Musgraves

#3. As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.

Ben Gibbard

#4. One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.

Jennifer Egan

#5. Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label
to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.

John Irving

#6. I started writing when I was a journalist. But every time I sat down to write a novel or a story, I ended up writing about myself, which was incredibly annoying and self-involved.

Damian Barr

#7. I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.

Wole Soyinka

#8. I write something that I believe I've made up, and it's only when a friend later points it out to me that I realise I've been writing about myself again.

Jo Nesbo

#9. I don't worry about being exposed. When I'm writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don't write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary.

David Sedaris

#10. I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts.

Shirley Jackson

#11. The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.

Chuck Klosterman

#12. If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways.

James Frey

#13. I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse.' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.

Charles Jencks

#14. To try and imagine that I'm another person is always going to be hard - whether I'm writing about a truck driver or someone who is gay, who's trans, who is of a different ethnicity or creed. But it would be boring if I always had to write about myself and my limited viewpoint.

Brian K. Vaughan

#15. I take my inspiration for the song writing from little experiences, not even if I've experienced them myself but say if something has made me sad, I will use that emotion. I just use everyday life and write about it.

Pixie Lott

#16. I can imagine moving out to the seaside at some point. I like Brighton, my sister lives there. I'm a seaside boy and whenever I go there, I find myself writing songs about it.

Marc Almond

#17. I write about things that scare me. I've never written a snake story in my life. I myself have never written a story about snakes because they don't scare me. I write about rats because they scare the hell out of me.

Stephen King

#18. Through the misguided notion that writing about flying was easy, I had McCone become a pilot. When I learned that research in books wasn't enough, I forced myself to take lessons.

Marcia Muller

#19. I basically have two ways I start writing. Either I'll start with something about myself, or something that happened to me that seemed important, or I'll start with some idea I have that doesn't have much to do with me. But one will always lead to the other.

Chelsea Martin

#20. I'll always write about what's going on in my life and the reason for that is it's not actually because I'm so fascinated with myself, it's because I can't think. I can't think like have thoughts in my head and think them through and come to a conclusion. It's like math for me.

Augusten Burroughs

#21. I am not a chess historian - I myself am a piece of chess history, which no one can avoid. I will not write about myself, but I am sure that someone will write ...

Wilhelm Steinitz

#22. I was left with myself and had to do the one thing I could to survive. I knew it would be difficult to write, very difficult, but I set about doing it.

Frederick Seidel

#23. My expectations for myself were never high. I had a very unusual way of writing songs and of thinking about music. I wasn't at all like Bob Dylan or Simon and Garfunkel. I was completely different - I didn't have a David Geffen at my side.

Don McLean

#24. I don't really pursue writing songs for other people. I guess one of the things I always think about is a good line in a song should be something I can hear myself saying.

Craig Finn

#25. I think there's something strange about writing a script I've written many, many scripts - dozens and dozens of scripts - and every time I start one, I think to myself: 'why in the world do I think I know how to do this?'

Brian Helgeland

#26. I'd been writing stories since I was a child. I wrote little books for my mom and bound them myself with needle and thread. Mostly, they were about my pets.

Tess Gerritsen

#27. I think of myself first as a singer, meaning an interpreter. Then I think of myself as a writer. It is an outlet I have to have. I get very hard to live with without something happening to write about.

Oliver

#28. I made myself a rule: write out of love. And when you love somebody, you have to tell the truth about who they are - not the cute "truth" in your head of who they are, the one where you did everything right and they did everything wrong.

Leigh Newman

#29. I got into writing music when I was, like, 14 or 15. It was a very private thing for me because I used it as an outlet and emotional release. I kept it very close to myself and didn't tell too many people about it.

Banks

#30. The more I've gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I've turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.

Natasha Trethewey

#31. I think I am doing my works to link myself, my family, with society - with the cosmos. To link me with my family to the cosmos, that is easy, because all literature has some mystic tendency. So when we write about our family, we can link ourselves to the cosmos.

Kenzaburo Oe

#32. There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.

Aleksandar Hemon

#33. I'm not conscious of my own themes as I write first drafts, no, and in fact, I work hard to stay in that unconscious space and not ask myself what the novel is about or what my metaphors might mean because then, I think, you're just dead in the water.

Laurie Foos

#34. Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile.

David Morrell

#35. I think the hardest stories we tell are always the ones about ourselves. And as a journalist, I was taught that I'm never supposed to put myself in the story. So I spent what, 11, 12 years of my life writing about other people so I don't have to face my own life.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#36. In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man. The purpose of it, of course, was to write about myself. That character was always the least fully realized. Eighteen years later, you realize, That's what he was about.

Sam Shepard

#37. I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.

Tom Robbins

#38. I was always into pop music, Destiny's Child, songs with catchy music. Even when I was writing when I was younger, it wasn't all about expressing myself; it was just about making fun music.

Eliza Doolittle

#39. I try not to write songs. I would rather emote them, and I found myself going back to my room every night while on my trip, just pouring out new songs and new stories about what I was seeing, what I was feeling.

Jason Mraz

#40. I don't want to paint myself as some kind of saint - that would be laughable - but I do think I've been able over the years to write humanely about subjects who are controversial and even contemptible. I've profiled pedophiles, stalkers, serial rapists, prison gang members and corrupt politicians.

Robert Draper

#41. The writing about what you know thing was a huge one. Not worrying so much about what people think. Just writing for myself and the band is enough.

Luke Temple

#42. People have invoked the ghost of Hemingway quite a few times in writing about the book. I could get into sticky territory here if I let myself go on about this subject. The more I hear it, the more it rankles, frankly.

Ron Currie Jr.

#43. 'If I Should Love Again' - I was just so impressed with myself writing something like that. It wasn't a single and people didn't really know about it, but it's a beautiful song and that's part of what I'm loving.

Barry Manilow

#44. I like the idea that Ernest Hemingway always wrote about certain things he knew, he knew the ins and outs, back to fronts of what he was talking about. I love that as an inspiration for myself, to keep it true to what you know. I'm always writing little lines and saving them for later.

Imelda May

#45. I worked with some directors, and it was really collaborative, and I was sort of writing with them. I was giving so many pieces of myself to their movies, I thought, 'It's about time I use my own voice for me, and establish my own voice.' So I knew I wanted to make films.

Paddy Considine

#46. I made a big conscious decision in my life when I was writing all these big action movies and doing different kind of fare but very proud of it, I was finding myself less and less passionate about doing it.

Ric Roman Waugh

#47. I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real
the lives I had read about in books.

Dorothy Allison

#48. I think that I have grown a lot as an artist. I have been writing about my experiences of love and overcoming the struggles that I have faced in the music industry. I have so much more to tell my fans, and I know so much more about myself. It is crazy how much I have grown over these past years.

Jessica Sanchez

#49. Sometimes, I marvel at the wonder
of how graceful words seem to appear
pen to paper; in others' hands
And I think to myself-
oh, how obsolete my existence is,
to be unable to do the same.

Joy Chua

#50. I do ask myself sometimes, what am I doing writing about animals that talk like we do? But I guess it's okay if it brings across a point.

Julie Andrews

#51. I'm actually embarrassed by the idea of writing songs about myself - I imagine someone hearing them and thinking This guy is a bit self-obsessed. I don't know if I really have a persona, in that respect. I want to just make the music and hide away.

Max Tundra

#52. After I left the Pumpkins, I went home and just sat around. I have a studio in my basement, and I found myself writing all these songs, just taking advantage of the relaxed situation. I wrote about 30 songs in about 30 days.

Jimmy Chamberlin

#53. I'm trying to do what Frank O'Hara did and remind myself there there's a lot of good stuff. I write about New York for my own mental health.

Frankie Cosmos

#54. When writing about Edinburgh, I place my characters in the parts of the city that I myself have lived in, or else know well, those being the Southside, Marchmont in particular, where I lived as a student, and the New Town/Stockbridge area where I live now and have done for the past 30 years.

Joan Lingard

#55. Writing about my illness put me into places. It was very triggering. I had to completely remove myself and practice self-care. I learned to be patient.

Jenny Lawson

#56. I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.

Roger Zelazny

#57. I see myself only sporadically as a teacher and consistently as a writer. Teaching is how I pay the bills ... and fortunately, for my students, I can intellectualize about writing, and I can talk about it well, and I like to talk about it.

Vijay Seshadri

#58. Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to slip inside a story and stop being recognizable, controllable, subject to blackmail.

Fabrizio De Andre

#59. In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#60. I think of myself as a very ordinary person. I like writing about the juxtaposition between people: the beauty of them at times and then the banal, everyday context in which we find ourselves.

Rachel Joyce

#61. I have a fondness for writing about precocious, troubled teenagers, who are alienating, but kind of endearing. It's from remembering so clearly that time in my own life. I experienced myself as more dramatically troubled than I was, but I just remember how it felt.

Ann Hood

#62. Most women would say they relate to 'Hedda Gabler' - there's a part of her in them. Ibsen was writing about a deep ambivalence that many women feel about domesticity. I think about myself and friends of mine - we have some of Hedda's qualities and traits.

Annette Bening

#63. I'm just not that comfortable writing so much about myself.

Mike Wallace

#64. I started writing songs by myself. That always came from whatever I was feeling and being honest about that because I never had any intention of anyone ever hearing them.

Kelsea Ballerini

#65. There is a lot of stuff I write that makes it seem like my intention is to make people think I'm speaking about myself entirely, and it is my intention to make people think that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's what it is.

Chelsea Martin

#66. I did not intend to write a funny book, at first. I did not know I was a humorist. I have never been sure about it. In the middle ages, I should probably have gone about preaching and got myself burnt or hanged.

Jerome K. Jerome

#67. Outside of interviews, I spend very little time thinking about myself. I spend time thinking about my writing and my children and other things that are pertinent.

Monica Ali

#68. The live show allows me to transcend myself, because it's not about me anymore. The writing process is very much about me but then the live show is not. They feel really different.

Fernando Torres

#69. Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.

Leslie Jamison

#70. I often find myself writing about people taking care of each other, or trying to. And often seem to write about situations that are too big for the characters.

Kenneth Lonergan

#71. One of the things I love about labeling myself as an author is that I can read books and call it "researching writing styles."
Mike Mankoff

Mike Mankoff

#72. I always tell people that if you gave me a pen and a piece of paper when I was a teenager and said, "Write out how you'd like your career to go," I would have probably short changed myself compared to what it's been for real. I'm just extremely excited about what I've accomplished.

Ice Cube

#73. When I'm writing, I'm constantly thinking about myself, because it's the only experience I have to draw on. And I don't see an exact reflection of myself in every face in the audience, but I know that my songs have validity to them, and that's why the fans are there.

Chester Bennington

#74. A lot of people, myself included, are excited about blogging and stuff like that, citizen journalism, but I do remind people that no matter how excited we are, there's no substitute for professional writing, no substitute for professional editing, and no substitute for professional fact-checking.

Craig Newmark

#75. I think of myself as a comedian who has the pleasure of writing jokes about things that I actually care about.

Jon Stewart

#76. I already feel a bit annoyed at myself for writing screenplays. It's a bit, I don't know, model-singer-dancer-actress that went to a posh school. There's something too weirdly predictable about it.

Emily Mortimer

#77. Anyone who writes books is at least mostly an introvert. It's amazing to be able to share that internalized part of myself, that little world that no one really knows about. I just wrote down it down on a piece of paper just to be crazy, and people loving that is so strange.

Pierce Brown

#78. It's fun to write about myself, but I feel like I would bore people with that.

Walter Martin

#79. I'm not writing about things other women do. I'm writing for other women to have more self-confidence because I need it myself! And if more women were in power, I would feel more comfortable.

Sheryl Sandberg

#80. Your hands learn to do things that you could spend a whole day trying to write about and articulate. There's a discomfort associated with trying to put all those different ways the brain works together. I kind of like to avail myself of that discomfort.

Jessica Stockholder

#81. I was in my early thirties writing about my early twenties, so there was this way of seeing my younger self from enough of a distance to have perspective but also not to feel that I had to protect myself. My dreams for myself then would have undersold myself in a way.

Dani Shapiro

#82. I have never learned how to tell somebody something good about myself; that should be a secret they must find out .

Joan Rivers

#83. I don't think talking about myself making songs is a very interesting topic, there are so many other more engaging things to think about and write about.

Jeffrey Lewis

#84. I stop and think before I start a new book and ask myself do I really want to spend the next year or two or three with these characters because if I don't, then I shouldn't be writing about them.

Judy Blume

#85. I talk to myself on paper about my characters - sometimes writing in first person ... I keep lists of unanswered questions that I can always turn to in order to get myself going.

Phyllis A. Whitney

#86. I made myself famous by writing 'songs' and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness, too.

Jack Kerouac

#87. Although I didn't write myself off as a complete failure, all illusion and romance was gone. I was no longer able to inflate myself; I had disappointed my own expectations and was genuinely worried about dying in the streets.

Arthur Nersesian

#88. When I made the decision to really get serious about my writing, I set myself a goal of 1,000 words a day for seven days. If I got to 7,000 words before Monday I could take a day off, but I had to get there. I had to do that every week.

Peter V. Brett

#89. I would stay [in the newsroom] until 3 am "in case something happened." But I mostly had nothing to do between 1 and 3 am so I used that time to write. And I chose to write about food and wine. Along the way I carved out a role for myself.

Eric Asimov

#90. I write from seven to about noon. I used to try to write longer, but I read and I found that I was always getting myself tired by working in the afternoon and then I was just throwing out what I wrote in the afternoon, so writing then was counterproductive.

Robert Caro

#91. I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: "I look at what I write so I can see what I think."

Jonathan Safran Foer

#92. It took me 14 years to write 'Crazy Brave' because I kept changing the form and I also kept running away from the story. I said I don't really want to write about myself. But it's about writing about memory.

Joy Harjo

#93. I never talk about what I'm writing about currently, never. It's private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.

Nadine Gordimer

#94. It's just like I get this identity crisis: my body doesn't want to write, my mind doesn't want to write. Nothing about me wants to write, but I force myself to sit there and try. Nothing happens.

Luke Temple

#95. I consider myself a writer who writes about American expatriates. And if I have any overt cause as a writer besides writing the best prose I can, it's to try to make Americans have a more visceral feeling about how America impacts everybody in the world.

Bob Shacochis

#96. When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.

Charles Bukowski

#97. It's really liberating and fun to be writing stuff for myself, and really have the freedom to say what I want to say and not really have to think about what somebody else is going to say or have to edit myself to speak from someone else's vision.

Bonnie McKee

#98. Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don't read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them.

J.M. Coetzee

#99. I let the music set the tone of the lyrics.I allowed myself to write more about relationships and emotions, in a girly way almost.

Jose Gonzalez

#100. At a certain point, I got used to writing on demand. I developed a habit of writing like I hired myself! I also like to write about things that affect me emotionally.

Jake Holmes