Richard Rodgers Quotes

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.

We're all inspired by what has come before us, but hope to use the inspiration to create our own. That's the artist's journey. It's a pretty amazing path.

That's what's great about the arts. Everything inspires you, and you get a chance to grow from watching other people and how they do their work.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

The creative process is not like a situation where you get struck by a single lightning bolt. You have ongoing discoveries, and there's ongoing creative revelations. Yes, it's really helpful to be marching toward a specific destination, but, along the way, you must allow yourself room for your ideas to blossom, take root, and grow.

I think that that's why artists make art - it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this.

I've never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.

I think the greatest privilege you have as an artist is time to nurture what you want to make; that's super luxurious. For you to rush into something, that doesn't feel fun to me. I'm living life in order to be able to write about it.

Looking back at it now, it's almost overwhelming, the amount of work that went into writing 'Shine', and to come up with the ideas that we're doing now.

We truly experienced a lot as artists.

I feel like, for me as an artist, it takes me a while of living with the tracks and living with the body of work to realize what it's all about.

How many of you are creative? I don't know, but for me, when you make a bunch of things over time and then you keep them... you forget. I look through my sketchbooks and I'm an audience for myself.

My ideas are not developed before I actually do the pieces.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise.

I get to study and I got to mimic and what I basically did was I stole from every person that I could steal from. I was an imitator. That's what I was. It was years before I could take all of these things that I loved about all of these different artists and put them together and find my voice.

There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing.

You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life.

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.

If you're a creative person, what inspires you is always changing; it's always shifting.