Marianne Wiggins Quotes

I've always loved both writing and songwriting. The journey is fascinating to me.

I write all the time. I always have. I can pick up my horn to warm up, and an idea will pop into my head, and I'll write it down and file it away for another time.

I'm kind of lucky in the fact that I can take something that's in my head and write it down, or I can listen to a piece of music that somebody else has written and try to tap into what the music's saying and just kind of follow that, you know. I mean, nine times out of 10, I'm just kind of following where the music takes me.

I think that once you start writing songs, you start developing a library of ideas that you can go and take from, so it gets easier as you go.

I have to have a guitar sitting around. I sing in the shower. I sing around the house. The music comes secondary. The lyrics come first.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

When I do write, it happens really easily. I'll just kind of sing along to whatever I'm playing, then find a line to build off of, then sit down and write. When I do write, I take care of business!

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

I think it's important to really press on with the song writing and just go with it. There's no code, there's no craft... it's just let yourself shine through your music. If it's meant to be loved and heard, it'll happen.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

I don't get my inspiration from a specific source. It's more like if you listen to a good tune, it gives me inspiration to write a better tune.

I don't listen to music when I write. I need silence so I can hear the sound of the words.

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

I started playing guitar when I was 13. I'd written a few songs on the guitar over some time. I'd written a book of poetry, and I got a book of lyrics that I had when I was a kid.

I wrote 'Show Me the Way' in the morning and wrote 'Baby, I Love Your Way' in the afternoon of the same day. I've been trying to figure out what I ate for breakfast that morning ever since!

And, of course, there were some times when I had writer's block and I had a hard time figuring out how to express what I wanted to express.

I think music comes out of silence... and I have a lot of silent time, without a pesky guitar interrupting my thoughts.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

I've never had trouble finding inspiration for new songs, no matter what I'm doing.

A lot of times, I get what I want to write while I'm driving. I love listening to music in the car, perhaps because of my dad - that's all he does.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing... sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.

I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.