Richard Thompson Quotes

It varies, I don't think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.

With writing music and writing songs and recording music and coming up with stuff, you need to kind of reengage that kind of inner child to come up with interesting perceptions.

I'm not one of these people who sits down and writes to say I'm gonna write a song about this or that, or a specific subject. The songs actually kind of write themselves.

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

You never know what an artist is going to create next.

It's true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is.

I think it's really important to not talk about how you're going to release something until you've finished it. People are like, "What are we going to make? What are we going to do with it?" and it's just like, "I don't know, we're just making music. Then we'll talk." You can't always write something you're happy with; you can't force it.

I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen... that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.

If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want.

I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

It was a roller-coaster process. For a long time I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't writing with an outline. And, rare for me, I wrote scenes out of sequence. . . . I didn't understand the play when I wrote it. It was something I'd give in to. It happens to me periodically. I give over and write whatever comes to me and I don't know what it means and then I do. It's thrilling.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff. But there's this thing that happens when the song first comes out, that sort of magic when it first comes out of the ether, and you can't even really explain where it comes from. That happens so much with music, and people understand that with music. But I really think that a lot of movie and TV should be the same way.

The best songs are the songs you write that you don't know anything about. They're an escape.

The main thing you worry about is just coming up with songs at all. I don't sit down and write stuff like certain writers do. They think about what they are going to write first and then they write it. I just get what comes in at me. It's like I'm a musician and if I can keep my mitt on, I can catch the balls that come at me.

I suppose that being moved to write a song is more applicable to me, I have to be moved, I have to have a reason to write a particular song.

Don't think. The worst songs I've ever written happen when I think.

To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience.

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.