Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

All my songs are where I am.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

I don't pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

My writing often contains souvenirs of the day - a song I heard, a bird I saw - which I then put into the novel.

I don't believe that a writer does something wonderful spontaneously. I believe it's the result of years of living, of study, reading, his very personality and temperament. At one particular moment, all these come together and the artist 'expresses' himself.

Art comes from a visceral need and is usually generated by something I have seen; writing comes from something that happens in my head and my heart.

I always draw from things around me that people around me have gone through... The story that could be taken really literally is not from my life exactly. But bits and pieces are, and the sentiment behind it is.

It has taken a great deal of energy, which has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply wait much of the time - until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form.

I think, with age, you learn that it comes in bursts and you've got no control over it. I'm not one of those people who says, 'I've got to write a song every day.' I just store up ideas, and really I have to wait until it finds me; I know when I'm ready to write. It used to frustrate me, but it doesn't any more. It's just how it is.

You boil down your influences to a soup, and it all informs you.

I don't really have a schedule; I just get up in the morning. I work at home. I don't feel that my work is a separate thing from living - I get ideas about what I want to write about from the real things that I'm worrying about as I live.

For me, as I was growing up, I studied architecture, I was into music, and I always felt that there was a gap between the things that I loved and consumed and who made them and how they made them.

It took me two years to write 'Fallingwater,' but it's one of my favorite pieces I've ever made, and it was worth waiting for.

I don't find the songs; they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come.

Sometimes a song can take up to a year to write, and because I waited that year and waited to work on it that day, it came up that extra 50 percent.

The subject gives you the best idea of how to make a photograph. So I just wait for something to happen.

Waiting is part of writing. When I write the word 'waiting' by hand it even looks like 'writing.'

I remember everything I know even the most superficial things. And what comes out is in my canvases.

I doubt I would have written a line ... unless some minor tragedy had sort of twisted my mind out of the normal rut.

Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.

writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.

My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.