Rodney Crowell Quotes

The move to creating stories was a natural progression for me, but the most pivotal time was probably in 6th grade: That year, a friend introduced me to the stories of Ray Bradbury, and a student teacher introduced me to creative writing.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you're at and you'll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.

'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.

It's so fun to make up stories, but I find that the songs that I'm most proud of came from a real thing in my life - 'Peter Pan' being one of those.

I think in most cases, when you're writing a song, you're just making up a little story, and you're not really thinking about making a point one way or another about it. You're just coming up with a little scenario and seeing it through, and that's it.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

I hadn't really thought about this until 'The Lake of Dreams,' but I've set all my stories in places that are familiar to me. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

Seriously, my music really does help my acting, and, like, getting in and out of a character from a different lifestyle and writing a song about it. Likewise, my acting inspires the music because I can write a theme that I wouldn't necessarily approach at all in life.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

There's a lot for screenwriters to steal from songwriters, in terms of getting to the point.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can't do? She's channeled the world of opera, Boston politics, magic, unwed motherhood, and race relations, creating scenarios so indelible, you swear they are right outside your door.

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.

There was a time when I read a script and I just got excited about the possibilities.