Cliff Chiang Quotes

I still connect with original emotions. 'Night Moves' was written about 1961 or 1962 when I was in high school, and it was about what my friends and I did in that period.

In 'A Likely Story,' I wanted to recreate the events, the mood, and the imagery of my life as a teenager. I was thirty-seven when I wrote it.

I really believe it's not bad to look back within music. I don't mean retro, but using your own memories to make a song because our memories are what make us who we are.

Persona-wise, I represent a lot of people's childhoods.

I feel like, when we are young, especially, while we are experiencing so many 'firsts,' when songs move us, we recall exactly where we were when we heard them.

You never forget where you were when you write a song; it's a very proper memory, so I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing for each track. It was like going into a time machine.

There's always little things that you can find to incorporate, I think, from your life, whether it be the exact circumstance or something similar that maybe brought up a similar emotion in you.

These are the pieces of my youth, the small secrets and the not-so-great expectations that defined my coming of age.

I think everyone must have a first memory of some house, some room, a vivid picture that will remain deep down in one forever.

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

I wish someone had told me that my stories are really mine to tell. In other words, anything that I think is important or that has moved me has the ability to move somebody else.

As an actor you bring some of your own experiences which can make things easier. You build off of it, but your imagination is always the best thing you have as far as creating things I think specifically for what that character is going through. But you're definitely drawing obviously upon things that you can connect to, and then you kind of mold the change that you're making into something that's right for the character.

As an actress, I think I really understand that stage where you think you are picking reality in order to feed the fiction, but it happens to be the contrary. It's the fiction that suddenly feeds your reality. And you don't know how it has been done. That's the kind of magical transposition that is art.

All of my short films are about marriages, and I think that this probably comes from some kind of unconscious fascination with my parents' story and what they went through.

The thing for me though, is that songs are good depending on the memories I have with them.

I was 19 when I recorded my first album, and I've been exposed to many things during these last few years; all the baby fat is gone.

When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.

Just when you think you should start accepting that you're becoming an adult, all your childhood fantasies come true.

Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them.

I'm quite happy to leave it still feeling that way, leave it before it starts feeling like a job. ... I have such fond memories of watching 'Doctor Who' when I was a kid and growing up, that if I've left anybody anywhere with memories as fond, then I feel like I've done my job.

My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.

With "Margaret," I remember clearly it was, you know because I did remember it clearly. I was young. I was young in terms of experience and what did I know about and I had an incredible memory from my own childhood. And so it never occurred to me to write for any other age group. And I thought I'm going to write a book and I'm going to tell the truth.

I think he [composer Joe Raposo] was the first man who kissed me on the cheek.

I don't think a lot of people listen to their old stuff, do they? I spent a long time making it, so I don't really want to spend much time listening to it again.

Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.