Emmylou Harris Quotes

When I start writing songs, and they come easily, I'm always very suspicious. That usually means they're reminding me of something I've already done before. When the songs become unsettling, and I feel anxious about what I'm doing, that usually means it's going to be more interesting later on when we actually record the stuff.

People say, "How do you write songs?" I say, "Patience." I may have a track that's hot, but no words. I'll just let it sit for years, because I know they're going to meet. They'll find it.

He pretended it was the only thing that kept him from it. But, far back in his mind, he wondered if he could write anything. Often the question threw itself at him when he was least expecting it. You have four hours every morning, the statement would rise like a menacing wraith. You have time to write many thousands of words. Why don't you? And the answer was always lost in a tangle of becauses and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws.

Song ideas have come to me in the middle of interviews, in the shower, or while I'm writing another song.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

I think every writer doubts themselves, every day. You procrastinate because you're afraid. You're always afraid it's not going to be as good as you want it to be. But, the key is overcoming fear.

People think that if you've written a book and somebody's given you a pat on the back then, you know, it's all - you're all settled, you know? You're going to be fine. I know that if I'm not confused, and really afraid, my work isn't going to be any good.

Sometimes I panic and think I can't really write.

To write fiction is to think that you're doing it wrong - that your work habits are inhibiting you; that you've chosen the wrong subject; that you've chosen the right subject, but that someone else has, unbeknownst to you, already written exactly the book you're laboring over.

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

I don't find the songs; they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come.

I can only write songs when somebody gives me some water to swim in. Otherwise, I'm a fish on the beach.

I'm not sure if the next song I write is going to be about love or a song about a tree.

Writing songs always trumps whatever else was on the schedule, it really is the most important and can be so fickle, you have to grab it when it's there.

How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and to be in touch with the miraculous.

That's the beauty of song writing. You never know when inspiration will come or how it will hit, you just gotta kinda grasp a hold of it and make sense of it somehow.

The music I really like to get off on is the old rhythm 'n' blues and rock 'n' roll stuff... that's what I really dig. And I also dig to sing ballads as well. And I also dig writing my own songs. I was just trying to find a way of integrating the whole thing, taking a look at the total picture.

I'm inspired to write songs in many different ways - it can come from a melody, a word or phrase or something I have seen on my travels around the world. It's one of the great bonuses of my job in that I get to meet so many people and experience different cultures and it would be hard not to be inspired.

Songwriting is a mystery. And it's a mystery to me that it's a mystery. But that sounds stupid.

It takes more talent to write music, but it takes more courage to write lyrics.

I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.

The opening line from a journal can be the beginning of a song.

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.

There was one sequence of days [making Lincoln in the Bardo] when I had halfway decided to use the historical nuggets, but I wasn't quite sure it would work. I'd be in my room for six or seven hours, cutting up bits of paper with quotes and arranging them on the floor, with this little voice in my head saying, "Hey, this isn't writing!" But at the end of that day, I felt that the resulting section was doing important emotional work

I knew I wanted to be creative but didn't know how.