Theophilus London Quotes

My main objective with every album is to capture a moment in time, which usually makes the whole process very relaxing. I only discover in retrospect when looking back at the songs how my life is going!

The first record I spent five years writing and it was an amalgamation of all the things that happened in my life from the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty.

Whatever happens in my life, whether I stand up or I fall down, whatever the case, I'm going to use it in my art. Why? Because I'm an artist and I have to.

I have been taking every step toward the future every day through making many paintings and sculptures with my deep emotion hidden in my life.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It's more 'thematically personal' - what's up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.

For me, making music is a continuous learning experience, and I think that it feeds itself.

Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It's equally humbling and uplifting.

I write based on powerful inner impulses, and those seem to shift over time.

My inspiration comes from my real life experiences.

The more I do in my life, the more I can write music about new experiences.

I don't think of work between albums. Of course, I go through regular life and I live and I experience different things, good and bad, and it does help me, but I don't think about writing or what I'm gonna do with whatever's going on while I'm going through it.

It never gets boring for me because there's so many different things to explore in the studio. The studio's become the sanctuary that people have come in and found new things out about themselves, as weird as that sounds. But it's true, I'm no different. I've made some crazy hard records, and I've made a jazz album.

I can't play anything until I find something that connects to my life, something I can carry as my secret map or code for the character.

I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.

A lot of my work comes from my life experiences.

I felt the need to get back to painting and I thought the best way was to start drawing, so I enrolled in a life drawing class. I soon discovered that people made very interesting subjects and I am still surprised that I had never discovered it before.

I like to have an album arc that comes from an experience rather than a story.

Anything that's really made an impact on my life, I want to get in the studio and write about it.

As someone whose music is connected to his personal growth, I feel an obligation to follow this muse wherever it leads.

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.

Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

The only reason why you should do a film is because it creatively carbonates you and gets you going. If you're doing it for any other reason, you've lost sight of why you're acting in the first place.

I view life as a learning experience. It is not so much all about music; it is about what happens when you are doing the music.