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Art & Creativity Quote by Carly Simon

"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"

About this Quote

Writing, for Carly Simon, isn’t a romantic muse story; it’s pressure relief with a purpose. The line frames songwriting as a controlled extraction: take the messy, private thing, pull it into language, then hold it at arm’s length long enough to survive it. That’s the clever pivot here. “Get it out” is bodily, almost medical, while “look at it in an objective way” borrows the vocabulary of therapy and self-management. Art becomes a way to convert raw feeling into something with edges and shape - not to erase pain, but to stop it from fermenting.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the idea that confessional work is just indulgent oversharing. Simon suggests the opposite: putting experience into a song is how you keep it from controlling you. The “inside” isn’t some mystical interior; it’s a closed room where emotions echo. Leaving it there makes it louder, sharper, more capable of harm. Externalizing it turns the self into a narrator rather than a hostage.

Context matters because Simon’s public persona has long been entwined with intimacy and scrutiny. When your voice becomes a cultural object - when listeners, critics, and exes treat songs like evidence - “objectivity” isn’t detachment so much as a survival strategy. The quote points to craft as containment: melody and lyric as a frame that lets a feeling be examined, shared, even monetized, without letting it keep stabbing in the dark.

Quote Details

TopicWriting
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Simon, Carly. (2026, January 17). 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. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-things-that-has-always-motivated-me-to-66925/

Chicago Style
Simon, Carly. "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." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-things-that-has-always-motivated-me-to-66925/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"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." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-things-that-has-always-motivated-me-to-66925/. Accessed 27 Mar. 2026.

More Quotes by Carly Add to List
Carly Simon on Writing as a Path to Objectivity and Healing
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About the Author

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Carly Simon (born June 25, 1945) is a Musician from USA.

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