Madonna Ciccone Quotes

I can only write songs when somebody gives me some water to swim in. Otherwise, I'm a fish on the beach.

Ah, 'Pather Panchali' was the most inspiring film that I wrote music for, and it was so spontaneously done. I saw the film, composed on the spot, along with myself and only four other musicians, and everything was done within 4-1/2 hours, I think an all-time record anywhere.

R. Kelly is different - music is always going through his brain. I remember we'd be having a conversation, and he'd choose a word I said and write a whole song to it.

Kanye West is a brilliant poet and artist. He and I work in a very similar way. We feel the vibration, the power of something, and it inspires us to create, whether it is music or design. It is the same process. Working with Kanye is a joy and great privilege. In 2012, we did collaboration together.

Those emotions that are really strong, the ones that inspire a song, you can hold onto that. You can let it marinate for years and keep writing about it even better than you did then.

The source is always me, but when the inspiration is an amazing idea or entity, it gives the process of music making a very beautiful route to proceed on.

You can't help but have ideas when you're inspired musically.

I'm not a sports person, but every now and then, I incorporate sports in my rhymes because I'm always grabbing from certain things and getting inspired by something whether I'm totally involved in it or not.

As someone whose music is connected to his personal growth, I feel an obligation to follow this muse wherever it leads.

I don’t have a problem baring my emotions in music. That’s one of the reasons I’m glad to have music in my life. I’m pretty resilient as far as being a human being. A lot of songs write themselves.

I took a complete year off the road, but a big part of that year was making 'The Big Revival.' I needed that down time just so I could concentrate. The one thing that starts it all for us is the music. That's what you create in the studio. That's where the magic happens.

Music breeds its own inspiration. You can only do it by doing it. You may not feel like it, but you push yourself. It's a work process. Or just improvise. Something will come.

Writing songs always trumps whatever else was on the schedule, it really is the most important and can be so fickle, you have to grab it when it's there.

A necessary process for the artist is one which begins with a point of view, a reaction to the environment, to people, to whatever it is one is concerned with.

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

Music comes first from my heart, and then goes upstairs to my head where I check it out.

Well, it grow together. It's like, first time I try to write a song is the first time I try to play the guitar. And so I can write a song without the guitar. But it really grow together. I really like stay with my guitar. But it just happen, is the inspiration come through man. Because, I personally, it look like, could I write a whole heap a tune, it look like. But I pick special tune to write. Cause a man can think of plenty things. Yuh know wah ah mean.

I like to be in the zone. I like being in the studio with the artists, with the producers, with the musicians, feeling it, and going there. I feel like I have a lot of content to start writing about.

A song doesn't just come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out. 'No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

Songwriting is like ... being possessed. You try to go to sleep but the song won't let you.

Out of my entire annual output of songs, perhaps two, or at the most three, came as a result of inspiration. We can never rely on inspiration. When we most want it, it does not come.

What I do as a songwriter is a constant force in my life, that I'm grateful to have.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master--something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent.

The biggest part of painting perhaps is faith, and waiting receptively, content to go any way, not planning or forcing. The fear, though, is laziness. It is so easy to drift and finally be tossed up on the beach, derelict.