Sondra Radvanovsky Quotes

I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.

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.

I'm a terrible sleeper because I work all the time. I stay up late almost every night working, whether it's on a TV or live show. I come up with new ideas, do research, watch loads of TED talks, or find psychology articles.

Through most of my life, music has been like a radio that plays and plays in my head.

I remember trying to write at 1, 1:30 A.M., and just sort of falling asleep. And I think that was actually a good creative state for weird ideas. I shifted to a morning schedule once I had two kids, and I still found that if I slept badly, I actually had better ideas.

I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.

The human mind is a wonderful thing, it starts working from before you're born and doesn't stop till you sit down to write a song.

I've never been able to develop a movie over several years, and keep coming back to it and adding to it. I get excited by the spark of an idea, and if I can't go make that, there's another idea that comes along that I get excited about. It has to happen quickly, in order for it to happen, at all.

It keeps me moving when I see people doing stuff that I see as "my" direction. I think, "Oh, it's been tainted. Now I've got to do something new." There's nothing worse than working on your own stuff and thinking that someone else is following you along.

Sometimes if I'm stuck on something, I'll have a drink, and it'll get me inspired and ready to keep going. But the trick to that, again, is that you have to drink responsibly! I've learned how to use it sometimes to help my creative process.

Most of the work on multitasking suggests that it generally makes you less efficient, not more.

I have a few things that I have written over the years that haven't been made, but I sort of feel like there was a good reason why they were not made. So I am not anxious to go back and fix them. I don't have something in the desk drawer that I think, "The time is right now. If I just do this, it'll be great." It is kind of out of sight and out of mind. I am thinking ahead rather than back.

There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all.

But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

There are times when the best writing you can do is to go for a walk or drive, a long drive is ideal.

I'm a thinker; I think too much. So for me to freestyle rap, it's like I'm thinking three, four time steps ahead, and I hate it.

Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I'd head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train.

During the course of the year a number of ideas just come up automatically. I could be walking down the street. Or shaving. An idea will hit me and I'll write it down. Then, when I'm ready to write, I check my little matchbooks and napkins and find that it is good or it's pretty terrible. There are other times when I don't have any ideas and I'll go into a room and close the door and I sit and sweat it out for a day or a month and eventually I come up with [something].

Songwriters can’t explain. You get an idea and you don’t know where it’s come from. And if you’re lucky, you have a pencil or pen and can write it down.

When I find myself having that much trouble with a song or a character or a story, I tend to move on.

I have often noticed that the need for cash and the production of a masterpiece just don't coincide with me. Money will hit me at a big off-period and genius will hit me in starvation, that is, I often get the money when I don't think I deserve it and have been lolling around for days and days thinking the most abysmal thoughts.

Shakespeare is dangerous to young poets; they cannot but reproduce him, while they fancy that they produce themselves.

It was dark and misty for 2 weeks, and I didn't come up with a thing. Suddenly the sun shone and it was, 'Wow, look at those beautiful Alps.' I wrote 'Mr. Blue Sky' and 13 other songs in the next two weeks.

I suppose that anyone who does any kind of creative work some time in their life - especially as you grow into middle age! - you come to a time where you really question more and more frequently, whether you have anything else to offer. And at its worst, you feel utterly bereft of whatever creative force it takes to do that work.

I find that in the course of the day when I'm writing, after three or four hours of intense work, I have a splitting headache, and I have to stop. Because the involvement, which is both creative and self-critical, is so intense that I've got to stop doing it.