Confessional Writing Quotes & Sayings

For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that's taking something that potentially should be celebrated - a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way - that's taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist. — Taylor Swift

My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me. — Michael Pollan

Something had happened, Something terrible, Raphael was raging, his unbound wrath waking every vampire in the building, threatening to tear the walls down around them and causing the very air to vibrate for those with senses to feel it. She'd never experienced such raw pain from one so powerful and she dreaded to discover what had caused it. — D.B. Reynolds

The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink. — Clive Barker

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

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

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

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real. — Jeanette Winterson

I'm young enough to enjoy life, and you're old enough to mind your own business. — Virginia Aird

Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don't see. — Peter Thiel

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

I find it relatively easy to keep my clothes on because I don't really feel like taking them off. It's not an urge I have. 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. That's putting myself out there, maybe even more than taking my shirt off. — Taylor Swift

A diamond is just another stone to one who is ignorant of its value. — Matshona Dhliwayo

I just can't fathom tweeting, and I'd rather spend my time writing a book than a blog, but I rather grudgingly agreed to a Facebook page. I had a brief, intense romance with Facebook. It's weirdly addictive, but anything that time-sucking is a danger for a writer who writes as slowly as I do. Now I post only occasionally and nothing very confessional. I think I'm carbon dating myself as I speak. — Debra Dean

You build a wall to keep something unwanted out ... or to hold something precious in. — Jodi Picoult

A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover. — Bell Hooks

1821, I told him, noting mailboxes of castles and pirate ships and the street numbers painted on them. I had to fis hmy penlight from my pack to see the numbers; streetlights were scarce, and the sky bulged with low, sooty clouds instead of helpful moonlight. — Dia Reeves

I long for the day I no longer long for him. — Franki Fiori

In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author's life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut. — Jane Yolen

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

None of us are saints. — Albert Fish

We are to pray in times of adversity, lest we become faithless and unbelieving. We are to pray in times of prosperity, lest we become boastful and proud. We are to pray in times of danger, lest we become fearful and doubting. We need to pray in times of security, lest we become self-sufficient. — Billy Graham

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional. — Thomas Pynchon

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

['Fire and Rain'] is sort of almost uncomfortably close. Almost confessional. The reason I could write a song like that at that point, and probably couldn't now, is that I didn't have any sense that anyone would hear it. I started writing the song while I was in London ... and I was totally unknown ... So I assumed that they would never be heard. I could just write or say anything I wanted. Now I'm very aware, and I have to deal with my stage fright and my anxiety about people examining or judging it. The idea that people will pass judgment on it is not a useful thought. — James Taylor

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

The best of you in Jahiliyyah are the best of you in Islam, as long as they have understanding. [Prophet Muhammad (SAWS — Anonymous

Never get in to it [acting] because you want to do it for the money. Have that passion in your heart, where you would do it for free just because you absolutely love it. If you just want to do it because you want to be famous, then go do reality TV. — Rockmond Dunbar

Use plants to bring life. — Douglas Wilson