Amy Grant Quotes

For your songs to connect with people, they've got to mean something to you.

I believe in working with songs that have personal value for me.

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.

Everything I do is personal. I have never made a movie that didn't have very strong personal resonance.

If the picture speaks to me, if it tells me something about myself, then I want it. Then I have to have it.

The way I write my songs is that I have to believe what I'm writing about, and that's why they always end up being so personal - because the kind of artists I like, they convince me, they totally win me over straight away in that thing. Like, 'Oh my God, this song is totally about me.'

If it doesn't come from your heart, music just doesn't work.

Whatever's going on with me at the time of writing is going to find its way into the piece. If that doesn't happen, then what the hell am I doing? So if I'm writing 'Inglourious Basterds,' and I'm in love with a girl and we break up, that's going to find its way into the piece.

I was inspired by Solange's album, 'A Seat At The Table,' from the moment that I heard it. She has clearly taken the time to create a unique body of work and emote through her music from a true place.

I don't care about making anything new. I make music to express an emotion, and if the emotion is nostalgic, so be it.

I just want people to be affected by the music. I'm really affected by my surroundings and put everything in my music - what I'm not getting and what I desire. I want it to be uncompromised... almost a spiritual thing.

I wanted people to connect to me on that level where I can write about anything, but it would still make someone feel a certain way.

I really want to make something that makes people think. I love that movie 'Tiny Furniture' that Lena Dunham made. I just love that movie, and I laugh at that movie a lot, but I also felt a lot too. I'm just inspired by people like that.

I don't think I could write about something I've never experienced or felt; all my songs are about things I've been through.

I simply find that as a songwriter, my goal is to try to move people. And I feel that before I can move other people, I have to genuinely be able to move myself.

The thing that makes me want to proceed and finish a song is when it really touches me and makes me feel something.

I like back-stories to music.

I do not believe that with a fictional character you can force yourself too far away from yourself. There has to be some of you in it.

All of the songs on 'Kiddo' were a part of my soul; they're songs that I could never give away.

I decided with 'Savage Season' to use a lot of things in my life as the basis.

I think my music is a way of communicating very directly with people and with people's emotions. I try to make music that doesn't need layers of complexity or obfuscation to speak to people.

I feel like I can't write something that has a real emotion in it if I can't connect to that emotion.

Music can inspire immediate emotional reactions, even if the only person who hears it is the person creating it.

I don't do films because they tell a particular kind of story, I do films with stories that touch me.

You can't write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about.