Carly Simon quotes: vulnerable truths from the songwriter slash author.
“Life is a dream even in its most painful moments, it’s a dream that we can dance to.”
“We can never know about the days to come.”
“I know nothing stays the same, but if you’re willing to play the game, it will be coming around again.”
“We need role models who are going to break the mold.”
“You usually can’t tell what’s inspiring until you look back on it.”
“Anticipation is making me late, it’s keeping me waiting. I always live in some kind of anticipation of something good happening.”
“Everyone has problems, and learning to share them is essential. Hiding pain requires an enormous amount of energy; sharing it is liberating.”
“Don’t mind if I fall apart. There’s more room in a broken heart. You know, that’s so much a part of life, being able to embrace the broken heart, not just cast it off as having no meaning or trying to get rid of it.”
“I always think it’s interesting to dig a little bit deeper every time you go to someplace that seems like a revelation or a strong connection to an emotional truth.”
“Worrying too much about other people’s ears and not my own, I lost my way.”
“When I’m feeling anxious or depressed, I do find it helps to reach for a pen and paper. There is something about writing things down, that hand-eye combination, that makes me feel calmer. Seeing things that are bothering you written down takes away their power. It gives you a perspective. Helps you contain them.”
“I think we do compensate by going off in the opposite direction. You can repeat the mistakes of your parents’ marriage or you can go out of your way not to repeat them.”
“I remember being onstage once when I didn’t have fear: I got so scared I didn’t have fear that it brought on an anxiety attack.”
“I thought that two of the most contradictory, but not contradictory elements, are fear and passion. I have both of them about my music because I’ve got so much passion to create with, and even to sing it with, but I have so much fear about getting in front of an audience and singing it. That informed the writing because fear and passion both came out very much in the same anecdotal way.”
“I had this terrible stammer, so I couldn’t really speak properly until I was 16 or 17.”
“Music brought me closer to the idea of God. Music gave me the energy to revise, revive myself; renew, rebirth myself. It was a palliative, a relief.”
“Well, I make every song I sing personal. I’ve never chosen a song that wasn’t.”
“One of the things that has always motivated me to write is the desire to get it out and look at it in an objective way, so that it doesn’t cause me any serious pain by staying inside.”
“Being in this business for as long as I’ve been in it, it’s sort of like living in a town or a city before the war and then after the war and then during the reconstruction and then during the time that it sprawls out to the malls.”
“I wasn’t the one who wanted fame, but got it anyway.”
“I wanted to be the little woman behind the man leading the academic life. I was too shy to be front of stage.”
“All men are created equal and all women are created equal as well, but equality seems much clearer when it comes to race issues. In the realms of man/woman, man/man, woman/woman love, it seems all are up for grabs now. We are exploring so much, but I think we gotta go for the fight for all equality first.”
“Undoubtedly, Patsy Cline was a trailblazer and in that respect, all women who are singular in a man’s field have a special power.”
“I took it to heart that in order to be a good person, you never said anything mean about anybody.”
“A really strong woman accepts the war she went through and is ennobled by her scars.”
“I used the physical scar of my breast cancer operation, the scar that I have across my chest as a metaphor for all kinds of scars.”
“I just want to show off my scar proudly and not be afraid of it. My scar is beautiful. It looks like an arrow.”
“I wrote a book titled Touched by the Sun, which is a chronicle, in loving detail, of the late friendship Jackie Kennedy Onassis and I shared. It is a meditation on the ways someone can unexpectedly enter our lives and change its course, as well as a celebration of kinship in all of its many forms.”
“In the last few years, I found myself doing what I’ve done with all the other things in my life that were too big to look at directly and too important to understand fully as they were happening: I put it down on paper. I found that writing about our time together was the only way to begin to know what she meant to me. Publicly, Jackie was important to all of us, but privately, out of the public eye, I loved her. I wanted to share my experience of her.”
“I wrote an autobiography titled Boys in the Trees. The main reason that I wrote the book was because I had kept diaries for a good part of my life – starting, really, from when I could write, handwrite.”
“I think when you get married, it’s not a totally free ride – it’s not without its unglamorous periods and its fights and its angry noons and silent dawns or vice-versa.”
“I think in the book gives a very good journey through the way I handled things that were desperately frightening for me. I think by the end of the book I have made that journey, and it’s as if I’m coming up through the water and having oxygen again. You know, I’m constantly reemerging in my life.”
“I grew up with lots of mystery in my house. I was always feeling on shaky ground when I was growing up. I didn’t know what was what, and that led me to feel very insecure.”
“I’ve learned that nobody’s perfect, and I don’t expect myself to be perfect anymore.”
“We change our opinions of ourselves so often. What the outside world thinks is only a small part of our image.”
“I’ve always thought of myself as being a warrior. When you actually have a battle, it’s better than when you don’t know who to fight.”
“You know when you take the paint off an old canvas and you discover that something’s been painted underneath it? That’s what I feel like – that part of the old is coming through the new.”
“You know, people want to honor me, and on the one hand I just don’t want to be a poster child; but on the other, I want to do something classy and great – something where the residuals will go to the cause.”
“I’m happy about most things in my life. I really am.”
“I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee.”
Related: Sheryl Crow quotes.
