Alfred Schnittke Quotes

A lot of times I have the song inside of me and I have to fight to get it out. I'm a very visual person, so I can see the song but I can't hear it. But I think that if your music becomes a war for it to happen, in the end there's a certain kind of aggression in the music. And I think that's a lot more interesting.

Over the years I always did some water colors, and I did a series of pictures of drawings. I always did it during a period of time that was slow in the photo business, but in essence it was always frustrating because I'd get started, and then it would be time to get back to work and I wouldn't get anywhere with the painting.

I can see a version of my life where it all becomes meaningless. On a good day, writing seems noble. Other times, it's narcissistic and pointless.

Every day I paint, and every day I compose music.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

I think attempting to make art is a utopian process in itself, definitely. Nothing I do is ever equal to the ideas in my head. You do the best you can, you do it with patience and love, and then you give up. The moment you give up is when you know the book is done.

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

I think I am worthwhile just because I have optical nerves and can try to put down what they perceive. What a fool!

I don't really have any advice, other than to say it's the most appallingly difficult thing I've ever tried to do and I wish I had a better idea of how to do it. In my experience what you end up with is the by-product of your failure to achieve what you set out to do. It may turn out OK, but it wasn't what you meant and you've no idea how you got there.

Writing a poem ... is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.

I was writing tons of music in my spare time. I might be on location somewhere, and I'd go home and I'd have my guitar and my little keyboard or something and write music. Or if I was at home, on my piano. I've always been a late bloomer with a lot of things, just in general, so I think this was something that needed to come to fruition in this particular way.

I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.

Writing is a sad process, sitting on your ass for many, many hours, alone in a room, smelling like coffee, sadness and bitterness, and watching your youth leave.

Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one's readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side than of that.

Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed.

The very day I purchased it, I christened my guitar as my monophonic symphony, six string orchestra.

They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my love

I don't love performing, because it's nerve-racking and it's time - consuming to rehearse a whole set - and my time can often be better served writing music and just making it and putting it out.

I think it's bad for human beings to be artists. It's awful. You want to do something but you're constantly trying to decide what you want to do. Let's just say it's no place like Hawaii.

The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.

Writing is a refuge from unhappiness, but has its own sorrows.

It took me some time to join the various streams of making music that was technically good and making music that made me feel good.

Now if I seem to be afraidTo live the life that I have made in songWell it's just that I've been losing so long.

It's funny, I don't even consider myself a rapper, I don't consider myself a designer, or even an actor. I just like creating stuff and trying to make good work, whatever it is. I don't care if it's designing toothbrushes. It's just making cool stuff to leave behind, that's all it is, it's nothing more.

Writing is so hard. Why would you be a writer if you weren't really good at it? If you could be anything else, why would you be a writer?