Sheila Heti Quotes

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

For me, as I was growing up, I studied architecture, I was into music, and I always felt that there was a gap between the things that I loved and consumed and who made them and how they made them.

You can't be 'on' everyday, no one is a hit machine all the time. But if you're loving the music it will happen. It shouldn't be laborious.

I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.

I doubt I would have written a line ... unless some minor tragedy had sort of twisted my mind out of the normal rut.

Anxiety is the essential condition of intellectual and artistic creation and everything that is finest in human history.

Depression is the flip side of creative inspiration but it can be useful. It's telling you to stop for a little bit. You can become so fully absorbed in the world of creative work that it can lead to some imbalance in your life.

Fighting to get up in the morning, fighting to get on stage, fighting to make music that makes people feel good when I don't - that's been a struggle.

A lot of my songs are inspired by a muse of some sort, whether she's real or not.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.

I'm happy to have a job. I play a little, write a little, perform some. It's not like it's an engineered, well-manufactured plan or anything. I just do what I do.

When you open your mind up, and you go into a creative state, you can't just switch if off. When you have an idea, a creative impulse, and then you ignore it, it can keep you up when you just want to go to your bed - which is why it's great to have voice recorders on your phone!

When I started doing music full time, I figured out my job wasn't something I needed to be completely sober for.

It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.

I have an office at my house, so when I go home I am always pulling inspiration and putting ideas together.

I wake up from dreams and go, 'Wow, put this down on paper'. The whole thing is strange. You hear the words, everything is right there in front of your face.

Art requires imagination. It requires Creativity. Creativity requires experience and experience comes from your life. And your life is expressed in your art.

In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work. The curtain of mechanization has come down between the mind and the hand.

I don't find the songs; they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come.

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.

I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.

I write at high speed because boredom is bad for my health.

I think everyone has been annoyed at school or in their life, that's a type of bullying. So, you can take those feelings and make them bigger. But I try not to use too much from my real life, because you'll be stuck with that all day.