Writing Quotes - Page 379

As far as arrangements after the basic track is cut, if I'm writing a horn arrangement or playing strings, I might arrange that, plan that out. Other times, I'll just sit and roll tape.

Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own--and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.

We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that 'except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it' I firmly believe this; by our partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a by word down to future ages.

He was one of these men who think that the world can be saved by writing a pamphlet.

John Lennon and Ringo Starr liked my songs. I used to write songs and they heard me sing songs on stage in London.

For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries: to read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style.

Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.

If I was writing a lifestyle book it would have the same advice on every page, and you’d know it all already. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables, and live your whole life in every way as well as you can: exercise regularly as part of your daily routine, avoid obesity, don’t drink too much, don’t smoke, and don’t get distracted from the real, basic, simple causes of ill health. But as we will see, even these things are hard to do on your own, and in reality require wholesale social and political changes.

For me, a song doesn't really take flight until it has a lyric on it. ...Without a lyric that I'm happy with, it could be the greatest song ever melodically or arrangement-wise, but it doesn't have any resonance.

It doesn't take me long to write songs.

I think that the song, the song "Stand By Me" is one of those songs that... and someone asked me, what was you thinking about or what was you feeling about? It's something that, songwriters just write songs. It's like an artist that paints. They paint what they feel. It's not, it's not about how many of these painting I'll sell it's just how they feel at the moment. And that's how I wrote "Stand By Me".

The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it’s to imagine what is possible.

You can't write if you can't relate.

When it comes to me, I just write the most beautiful music I can, I do the best work I can, and then I hand it out there.

I would be content if I had nothing but a tape-recorder. I could still write songs and record them

Words and sentences are subjects of revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.

I suffer from the disease of writing books and being ashamed of them when they are finished.

The single most important thing you can do politically for gay rights is to come out. Not to write a letter to your congressman but to come out.

I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.

I work eight hours a day, but I'm not writing all that time. I'm thinking, editing, looking something up. Thinking is what I do a lot of.

There can be no more ancient and traditional American value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought it with them to this country three centuries ago, and they quickly imposed it on the Africans--who were not allowed to learn to read and write--and on the Native Americans, who were simply not allowed.

Because I'm a "strong person," the symptoms hit me by surprise. It was, as I write in the book, stinging in my eyes after Sunday that I thought was an allergy, until one day I sat in the car and decided to just let my eyes tear up so that whatever was in them would come out, and what came out were tears that wouldn't stop. It was literally a physical reaction that was my first indication there was anything wrong.

Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is as usueful as bread.

A reader has to be concerned only with the end result; unless he chooses to analyze it, he does not have to know by what means that result was achieved-but it is my job to know.

I'm good at melody - I'll write the top-line melody and ideal words I want to go with it. But I'm not that good at writing lyrics. I bounce those back and forth with songwriters or someone who can sing.