Lorne Balfe Quotes

For me, the most difficult piece is the one I'm about to make.

I've always felt that there's a point where a piece seems to be alive, that is, living. And that's the point where I know the composition is finished.

I've gone seventy-nine hours without sleep, creating. When that flow is going, it's almost like a high. You don't want it to stop. You don't want to go to sleep for fear of missing something.

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.

You can't manufacture inspiration, so a lot of it is still a waiting game for me. There's still a lot of mystery to songwriting. I don't have a method that I can go back to - they either come or they don't.

There's an element to songwriting that I can't explain, that comes from somewhere else. I can't explain that dividing line between nothing and something that happens within a song, where you have absolutely nothing, and then suddenly you have something. It's like the origin of the universe.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

Whenever I finish a movie, I usually go through a period where I think I'll never have another idea. And then, somehow, you get another idea.

The words that I'm most happy with are the ones that come from my subconscious rather than my conscious. They just feel right. I think that's the same with music, really. If you're doing an album, there's ten or eleven sets of lyrics, so you get to the point of inspiration ten or eleven times - it's difficult.

I know how demanding the process of creation is.

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

Everybody faces a blank piece of paper, no matter what they've written or painted or composed before. I can't imagine approaching every single new project with-without doubt.

The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.

Songwriting is a very mysterious process. It feels like creating something from nothing. It's something I don't feel like I really control.

I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

I have let half-decades elapse between books because books have to be writte and writing is awful, but if you are the type of person who makes things, there is no profit in worrying about how or why or when the next project will come into being beyond simply acknowledging that it is inevitable that it will be very soon.

I always have music playing in my studio when I design. It really gets me in the mood and allows me to focus.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

When I finished a song that I thought was good, I thought, I don't know where that came from, so I have no idea if I can do that again. I'm talking like, a hundred and fifty songs down the line. I still feel that.

But it's like the horror of being in a studio with a blank canvas. I used to always run out of ideas because there are so many possibilities and I would just think, well what am I going to do now!

I'm not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

I think making art is something where you think you know, you also know you don't know and you hope - all these things are in play all the time. I think it's what makes the excitement of creativity for the artist.

I try and reduce myself to an almost blank slate and hope to God that I am creative.