Eric Whitacre Quotes

I've always wanted to make music like people write plays, so I was inspired by writers as much as musicians.

I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

I began to write a kind of waltz and in a little more than an hour I had the theme written.

Drawing and visual pursuits were first. Music came and found me in a way. Really, what it's about is creative problem solving, and music is a lot more an expression of that than painting is for me.

I try to get underneath the skin of all kinds of music, and I never know what's going to inspire me and what makes me crazy.

You're in good spirits when you create and produce great music. All situations inspire music in different ways, man, from good situations, bad situations, depression, falling in love, falling out of love. I've been going through all those type of things.

I don't know what aids creativity. All I know is that it feels natural to hold a guitar in my hands and sing.

The feeling that you want the listener to get, you should get yourself when you first hit that chord, and that melody comes to mind.

People would always ask me how I came up with my music and what it felt like to make music, and I would always see colours, and then I found out that that was synaesthesia. It helps me understand songs and what I like.

I don't write songs, songs write me. ... Writing a song can be agony or ecstasy. It can take half an hour or half a year. ... The popular song is America's greatest ambassador.

I would find myself, not necessarily always assigning these little bits of music for here or there, but all of a sudden something would fall into place and it would be exactly that.

I try to get a degree of realism in my music.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

I loved the guitar, and I had all of this music in my head. My passion for the guitar and the ideas for what I could create musically were equal. So that's where I was.

I've been gearing up for this future of writing a lot of new music by digging into my favorite old stuff, and twisting it around and highlighting the things I really love.

I'm making music with my friends. It's fun. It should be fun. You shouldn't make music if it isn't fun.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

Inspiration for my music just comes from, you know, my life experiences.

I never presumed that a technique of composition or an idea was so special that just using it would guarantee the quality of the music.

I'm not a video brat. I don't derive all my inspiration through movies. I get it from a lot of other places, too.

Everyone who makes music is a good collaborator at their foundation because in order to make music, you have to connect to it in a way that other people can't.