Tom Hanks Quotes

Oh yes, much, because music is just something that comes to you. You don't question it.

Any song I have to work on longer than a day, I just leave it. It's not gonna work. Everything that's good is really instant.

You have 'listeners' ears' when you're just starting out, and your 'listeners' ears' tell you what will work. You lose those ears later, when you break songs down into production elements too much.

I've noticed it a lot. I'm not someone who revises. It's always the first movement, it's that. It's an instinct. Either it works straight away, or it won't ever work.

I never overtly analyse my own movies, I don't think that's my job to do that. I just muddle through and do what I think is best for the movie.

There's always hunger to create because I believe that's what I do. I believe that's what I'm supposed to be doing.

Albums tend to dictate what they need. Every time I have made an album it sort of feels like it is decided for me how that album is going to sound; it is not really a cerebral decision where you sit down and decide that you are going to make an album that sounds like 'this.'

I like to write lyrics when I feel it, and because of that, I like to keep a log of lyrics all the time.

I'd say, 90 percent of the time, I get an idea, like, within 10 seconds of somebody telling me what their whole thing is about. And usually that flash of an idea, it's what I always go with. It might change slightly, but in general, that's pretty much it. To get me to change the entire idea is pretty tough.

I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born. I have confidence in it. I do not think about it.

The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

It sounds corny, but it's absolutely true: A song chooses me. I don't go looking for a certain kind of lyric. It kind of develops its own little arc and I'll just see what happens.

The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.

I don't really know why an idea comes to me. But all of a sudden, an idea comes and from experience I can intuit what something means when an interesting line pops up. Or I can intuit what an interesting choice might be. And I can try a couple of different choices, and see which one feels right, and then continue the song to see where it goes.

My responsibility as an artist is to turn up at the page or the piano or the microphone. The rest is up to God.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

I remember the few times that happened to me in writing, where you basically start writing and you look at the clock and six hours have gone by and you're, like, "Whoa! What the hell just happened?" And that piece ends up in the final product even though the final product is three years away. It doesn't get rewritten. It came out the right way. But that's happened to me so few times in my life.

Sometimes I look back and think, "How did I write that? The book is smarter than I am!" I have never written strategically, but rather, followed the dictates of my muse.

I wonder if I would have been capable of producing anything if I worked in a more conventional way with a prewritten script, because I'm of the procrastinator class.

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.

The trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they’re done, not to worry about things ahead of time.

As an actor - like an artist - you have to ask, "Why do I choose a certain moment to play something a certain way?" It's organic to who we are.

Although it's pretty rare that I'll get completed, finished lyrics to a song and feel like it's done, and then decide that it's not worth doing. Usually, I can tell along the way - even if it's something I've been working on for a couple of months - that it's just not going to work. Maybe I'll come back to it a few months or even a year later, or maybe it's just gone.

...insight, vision, moments of revelation. During those rare moments something overtakes the man and he becomes the tool of a greater Force; the servant of, willing or unwilling depending on his degree of awakeness. The photograph, then, is a message more than a mirror, and the mans a messenger who happens to be a photographer.