Tyler Joseph Quotes

When I was going to school and under the influence of Abstract Expressionism, I believed that if you had a give-and-take rapport with your work that it would be you, and that would be all that was required. It would be honest, and the core of your personality would come out if you responded to position and contrasts in your work.

I never think of my audience when I write a poem. I try to write out of whatever is haunting me; in order for a poem to feel authentic, I have to feel I'm treading on very dangerous ground, which can mean that the resulting revelations may prove hurtful to other people. The time for thinking about that kind of guilt or any collective sense of responsibility, however, occurs much later in the creative process, after the poem is finished.

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

I use myself for each part. Naturally, it's my body, it's my soul, it's my feelings. That's the only way I know how to work. I couldn't pretend.

My greatest achievement is being able to write records that are real snapshots of what's going on in my life. I won't repeat myself for the sake of commerce, or to please other people.

I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that's awfully vague.

Mostly, drawings are things I make for myself - I do them in sketchbooks. They are mental experiments - private inner thoughts when I'm not sure what will come out.

I really don't think of my work in terms of a genre. I think of it in terms of what I want to say, what I think is cool, and what I'm good at.

For me, art really starts with acceptance, self trust. Wherever you come to with art, it's perfect. You don't have to come with anything. What you bring to something is the art. That's where it's found. It's found within you.

I will say that a lot of songs that I've written are from my own personal experiences which are special to me.

I started writing songs by myself. That always came from whatever I was feeling and being honest about that because I never had any intention of anyone ever hearing them.

Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience's response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don't care about the audience's response, I'm making them for myself. But I'm making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.

Some stuff I don't even put out. I'll just be home, happy, creating something for myself, and then ball it up and throw it in the trash. It's less about trying to prove something or get on somebody's list or make a fan happy or make a hater mad or convert a non-believer. That's not the case for me anymore.

The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.

I write about what I'm going through.

I don't try to write songs that will further my career. I write about things that I care about. I don't have a career as much as I'm having an adventure with a guitar. I never liked the business way of doing it. You have to follow some sort of instinct.

I don't write for an auditorium full of people. I don't write for the microphone; I write for the page.

I mean, if you decided to go out today and get you an instrument and do whatever it is that you do, no one can tell you how you're going to do it but when you do it.

I've been writing poems since I was in the Navy - to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

If I haven't any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

Joni Mitchell's someone who has tried to make sense of her own world, sometimes painfully, through song.

I just write the way I feel, and if it feels good to me, hopefully everybody likes it.

Every now and then, as a composer and producer, it's important to write music for yourself.

I wanted what I was doing to be really true to me and my tastes. That's what 'Worlds' was, me taking a break from what I was doing and doing something that was honest, authentic and real.

I like the songs that are fun, that aren't gonna change the world - I've some of those - but even something like, 'You Should Be Here,' that was my chance to say, 'Look, this is me, too. I'm just a normal person.'