Pete Townshend Quotes

Most of the time one is discouraged by the work, but now and again by some grace something stands out and invites you to work on it, to elaborate it or animate it in some way. It's a mysterious process.

After it's finished, sometimes I can trace a path that goes back to the possible source of inspiration.

Whatever it is that I thirst for in my current project tends to turn up in my following project.

My writing is inspired by just about everything, yet I am unaware of so much of the process.

That little window like 2004 through like 2010 was probably the most, like most inspiring time of my creative life, for sure.

Little things happen to us during the course of our lives when we were children that stay with us.

When people ask me what qualifies me to be a writer for children, I say I was once a child. But I was not only a child, I was, better still, a weird little kid, and though I would never choose to give my own children this particular preparation for life, there are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.

I started writing when I was 9. My mother told me it was before that, but that was the first I remember.

I always feel like my writing is consistently influenced by everything I watched and listened to growing up, so it's just this crazy collage of everything, you know.

Anyone in the arts has had an experience of seeing someone who they related to doing something and thinking, 'I could do that.' If you have one generation where you force its hand a bit, then the next one fills in the gaps, because it's seen an example of what can be done.

Art is not the kind of thing where you get what you put into it all the time. So I learned to not expect anything other than the sort of joy of having a poem in front of me.

If you're writing for yourself as an artist, you are always pulling on your own experiences.

When I look back to my childhood, many concrete scenes come to my mind, good ones and bad ones.

Art is a direct reflection of the life you live. What you experience comes out in your work.

It was always quite negative messages on love I was given as a kid.

Growing up, my aunts would always put in hair ties and bows and all kinds of stuff, and I always hated it.

Throughout my life, there's just periods when I write and periods when I don't. I don't feel like anything's really blocked. It's just not where things are at right now, and it's just a matter of time until there's something going on where I feel compelled to write.

My grandparents, Jim and Pat Moore, were an incredible couple. They drove me to the community theater, where I did plays as a kid.

When I was a kid, I was really quiet.

A tennis racket lurks in my earliest memories like a sick relative who had come to live with us. When I look at my baby pictures, there it is, resting in my crib in the place of a rattle or chew toy.

To be honest my first memories are getting to know players. I remember being on the bus probably like 3, 4, 5 years old, and my dad would always say go sit with the players in the back.

I don't really remember a lot of my childhood.

The books that stuck with me most as a child were 'A Wrinkle In Time', 'Dracula', 'Hatchet', 'Bunnicula', 'White Fang', and this YA/kids' book called 'Nobody's Fault' where a kid drowns one weekend as friends play around a flooded ditch.

Looking back at it now, it's almost overwhelming, the amount of work that went into writing 'Shine', and to come up with the ideas that we're doing now.

I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial.