Quotes About Vulnerability

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

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.

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.

Part of the problem with America is that letting go of emotions is viewed as a weakness, but it's my strength. That enabled me to write my songs.

Whenever I get stuck on something, I'm like, 'What would I do if I wasn't afraid? What would I write if I wasn't afraid? What would I say in this situation if I wasn't afraid?'

I couldn't possibly write 'Next to Normal,' but God, I can weep and watch 'Next to Normal' five times.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

I'm not a writer.

The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart.

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.

'True Romance' was definitely, in part, still me finding my voice as a writer. I was nervous, and I was a lot more shy. The album sounds bruised.

I'm a lousy writer, and it shows when I try to write poetry.

From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

Graham Greene famously said that all writers need a chip of ice in their heart; Cusk can come across as the most beautiful ice palace of stalactites and stalagmites, and some people find her company, albeit by proxy, about as inviting as a long weekend in a walk-in frigidaire.

Writers and musicians are very similar in that the chances of making a life in either field are so infinitesimal. And once you're in, the chances of staying viable are difficult. But there is something incredibly different about performing in front of a live audience, as opposed to sitting at your desk typing.

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

When you're tied to one show, you are very much at the mercy of the writers, so you can suddenly get a script where you have a heart attack and die.

A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It's what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it's also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths.

In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.

I've always seen it as the role of an artist to drag his inside out, give the audience all you've got. Writers, actors, singers, all good artists do the same. It isn't supposed to be easy.

The sublime moment seems to be only a product of allowing yourself to get through, to get to a lot of stuff in your life, write about a lot of stuff and not edit yourself. That is a great lesson to learn for anybody that writes or creates in anyway, to be able to make something without being good or bad.

Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.

No one writes about the emotional things you go through.