Ray Bradbury Quotes

My main goal as a songwriter is to make something that inspires people. To write things about my life that people can relate to. Whether it's a whole record or just one song for someone, I hope it can do that for them. Knowing that I have the ability to do that is inspiring to me.

In order for me to write, I have to experience life. I write the songs based on real life, and I perform them from a very real place.

You've got to live life to write a book about it.

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?

In order to write about life first you must live it.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

You can't write about stuff you don't know about. You have to live it. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Live life to be a good songwriter.

I'd say most of my songs I write from personal experience. When I feel like I don't have any inspiration in my personal life, I think about others that are close to me and maybe what they're going through or even just people I've come across, acquaintances.

I don't know anyone who is a writer who isn't influenced by the relationships in their life.

You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.

Lyrics mean a lot to me, and I won't record a song unless I can feel it. That's something I learned from Carter Stanley. Even when he wasn't perfect technically, he got inside a song and sold it emotionally.

There are so many fun things that you live that you can write about and people of all ages can connect to.

I think you have to experience life and then pull certain experiences into your act and your character's life, whoever you play, so you're full.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

I write about what I know, what I live, what I observe.

With writing, I think you have to be honest with yourself. I have a certain kind of writing; that is, I like to really embellish the human spirit. You have to write about something you have a feel for.

Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy communicating and connecting.

I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life.

People will come up to me at shows and tell me that a song touched them in a completely different way than I wrote it. That's fun. Fans translating it in their own way.

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

When I write something that would have made me laugh as a 10-year-old, or would have scared me or would have excited me, I know I'm onto something.

And if you don't live, you have nothing to write about.

Movies like that aren't about the visual effects and explosions. They're human stories about family, about life, about death.