Ann Powers Quotes

Reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but writing is what you are doing.

I wrote the music column in my high school newspaper.

I couldn't imagine what it's like to be a journalist talking about music. You're left with empty descriptions; you probably have to make up a sort of weird cocktail of band influences and references to other music to get your point across.

I'm always very careful to make the distinction between music criticism and music journalism. A lot of people don't. But criticism doesn't require reporting. You can write criticism at home in your underwear. On the other hand, journalism takes legwork - you have to get out there and see things and talk to people.

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

Inspiration comes from so many sources. Music, other fiction, the non-fiction I read, TV shows, films, news reports, people I know, stories I hear, misheard words or lyrics, dreams... Motivation? The memory of the rush I get from a really good writing session - even on a bad day, I know I'll find that again if I keep going.

I've always been a writer, and in high school, I was the editor of my school newspaper and I got a writing scholarship. It's always been a passion of mine.

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.

You know I take music seriously, right? So I expect journalists to take being a journalist seriously.

I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.

I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.

I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

Still, to this day I go back and listen to music that inspires me to write now.

I'm definitely a writer. I don't even know how to freestyle.

Here's what I think about music and journalism: The most important thing is to just press play.

I am now in the full maturity of my age and vigor of my mind. Persons of various descriptions have repeatedly solicited me to turn my mind to dramatical composition. It was, indeed, the first amusement of my thoughts in my school-boy cell.

I decided to study music my last year in high school.

I'm a musician and I listen to music all the time. If there's something out there where someone would tell me that I should listen to, I would listen to it.

No matter how long my day job hours were, I always made time to write. I wrote fiction, short stories, and poetry. I never shared it with anybody.

It's easier to write about a celebrity, a personality, than it is to dig in and write about the music.

When I went to college, it became more of a hobby, and that's when I think I got the realest music education. It wasn't something that I had to do. It wasn't an obligation.

I really started considering myself a writer when I was about seven or eight years old. I wrote stories from my dreams and kept them all in a notebook that I still have.