Eric Weiner Quotes

I've written songs everywhere, and I think the place does matter.

If you're sitting in a place like Martha's Vineyard, I don't think you're going to write a song about a ski resort.

For whatever you're doing, for your creative juices, your geography's got a hell of a lot to do with it. You really have to be in a good place, and then you have to be either on your way there or on your way from there.

I've never set a book in Europe. I've lived in Europe three times, but somehow or other it wasn't the experience that engaged me in that way.

Many men of genius must arise before a particular man of genius can appear.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

Location is a very important aspect to songwriting.

For my first three books the setting (or place if you will) has always been a given - N.J. and the Dominican Republic and some N.Y.C. - so from one perspective you could say that the place in my work always comes first.

I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.

You can't hang around geniuses forever because they end up taking everything you've got. That's why they're the genius and you're not.

Where you are defines what you're interested in.

Oh, I'm impressed with Lorraine Hansberry. She was a genius at whose feet I could sit.

Things don't happen in a vacuum, and artists don't make work in a vacuum.

I think that place is a huge part of pretty much any musician's work, in how one responds to an environment, whether it be your actual surroundings or the more figurative place we're all living in.

... the genius never makes anything new, but always something that is just different, and the average talents provide him the possibility within which his genius condenses into achievements.

I don't think people are born artists; I think it comes from a mixture of your surroundings, the people you meet, and luck.

I've always been a big believer in the power of place. I believe that where we are affects who we are when it comes to happiness, spirituality, economics and creative genius.

Inspiration is the opportunity of genius.

I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.

Where we are is vital to who we are.

Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

Genius differs from talent not by the amount of original thoughts, but by making the latter fertile and by positioning them properly, in other words, by integrating everything into a whole, whereas talent produces only fragments, no matter how beautiful.

Genius points the way, talent takes it.

Art comes from everywhere. It's your response to your surroundings.

If you want to have a creative culture, you can't get it by reading books. You get it by example.