Timothy B. Schmit Quotes

I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey.

The first song I ever wrote was when I was 12, and it had, like, four lines in it. You progress and get better.

I started writing songs, I guess, when I was about 13 or 14, but I didn't know if they were good enough yet or anything.

Being an artist doesn't mean that you're a good artist. That was the bargain I first made with myself: I'd say, I'm an artist, but I'm not really very good.

One of the big songwriting things for me has always been: always think what you do sucks. Because the second you stop believing that, you suck. And that's a fact.

When I first decided I wanted to make beats and write songs and stuff like that, it wasn't like I sat down and the first thing I wrote was even halfway legit. It took a while to find my way through it.

I feel like I always describe myself as a late bloomer. My first album, in my mind, was that I had a few songs I needed to take from incomplete demos to working with someone else and finishing them.

The second half of the '60s really was a kind of learning period, in terms of writing, for me.

I'm just trying to work out how to write music now, because I've never had the opportunity where my number-one priority is writing music. I don't know how my brain works yet.

I always try to make my next song better than the last.

Expect to be disgusted by your own early work. If writing is your vocation, if you hope that it might be your salvation, push on through the disgust until you find one true sentence, a few words that say more than you expected, something you didn't know until you set it down.

I wonder if the greatest challenges was to keep pressing into [writing] when I had never been here before. I felt like Abraham - being called to something that he didn't know how to get to.

I was petrified about 'I'm in You.' I couldn't wait to get it done to know whether it was good or not.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take.

I feel like, for me as an artist, it takes me a while of living with the tracks and living with the body of work to realize what it's all about.

I can put some chords together and maybe write a song, but I'm learning every day. And that's the fun part.

People ask me when I decided to become a playwright, and I tell them I decide to do it every day. Most days it's very hard because I'm frightened - not frightened of writing a bad play, although that happens often with me. I'm frightened of encountering the wilderness of my own spirit, which is always , no matter how many plays I write, a new and uncharted place. Every day when I sit down to write, I can't remember how it's done.

The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.

I lose faith every time I have to start a new page, and this is no joke. I've occasionally been criticized over the past couple of years for publicly "complaining" about how difficult drawing comics is, yet I've only mentioned it so that the younger cartoonists who are trying it out and finding it difficult and painful realize that they're not alone. There's not really any set way of learning how to do this, and it's always a struggle to improve, and, more importantly, see accurately whether or not one's work is communicating any shred of feeling or truth at all.

When I was in art school, I thought art was something I would learn how to do, and then I would just do it. At a certain point I realized that it wasn't going to work like that. Basically, I would have to start over every day and figure out what art was going to be.

Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

I'm able to come and do a new sound and grow even more and make greater songs because my song-making abilities have grown.

I just tried to come up with some honest songs. What I was writing about was real plain stuff that I wasn't sure was going to be interesting to other people. But I guess it was...I've never had any discipline whatsoever. I just wait on a song like I was waiting for lightning to strike. And eventually-usually sometime around 3 in the morning-I'll have a good idea. By the time the sun comes up, hopefully, I'll have a decent song.

I've come to recognize songwriting as something that I do, and I want to be good at that. At that craft, if you like. I want to practice it.

When I do it [writing] by myself, there's a lot more terror and uncertainty.