John Grant Quotes

In 1997, I thought I'd never make another record.

You know, I get a lot of people pitching songs to me.

I think somewhere along the way I realized, 'O.K., no one's gonna care about a chubby Jewish dude rapping.' I realized I'd be better behind the scenes.

I stopped writing lyrics down on paper after me and Jay-Z did 'Money In the Bank.' They're something I just hold in my mind.

I'd done an EP, and nothing came from that, and I didn't know where to go from there.

My sons are coming out with music. Square Off, they're called.

I got about 6037 songs I wrote myself and I'm trying to get them on the market and I just wish people could hear them and stuff but they'll do pretty good.

I'd actually say that every musician is a human being, and that not everybody likes being social. But with music, there are all these ingredients to the business that have nothing to do with writing songs or playing an instrument.

If people knew what made hits they'd make more of them, so to have the illusion of control over one's career isn't something I can even pretend to have.

When I came back to California in the early '60s I was hanging out with Jimmy Bowen, Phil Spector, and I wanted to be a record producer and work with other artists.

I'm never doing a new album. I'll probably do nothing but singles. I'm as good as anybody out there lyrically and conceptually and can go toe to toe with the best of them throughout history. But I don't know how much longer I'll be doing it. It's not really fun anymore.

I don't write songs thinking about formats, where is it going to get played, who am I gonna please, what's the outlet for it.

No matter how many awards you've won or how many sales you've got, come the next book it's still a blank sheet of paper and you're still panicking like hell that you've got nothing new to say.

I just love singing, songwriting and touring.

Well, Neighbours wanted to do a song on the show, and they asked me what songs I had. I told them I'd just written this song, called Born to Try, and I had just gone overseas and spoken to some people from Song about it.

First of all, I think that is true, if you are a musician, particularly on the come, that you do have to end up in one of these musical centers, some way, to be viable, saleable and so on.

I'm a songwriter and I'd love to make that a part of my career.

I had pretty much raised my kids and my first wife and I were divorced, so I began, in earnest, to start my musical career again. Going for the big record deal and all of that.

I'm from a little island off of Massachusetts, Nantucket. It's hard getting into the music business from there, but my parents took me to songwriting festivals because I would write and produce my own music.

I just really want to make albums - and however I can, I will.

I don't have the desire to just keep every record and put it out. That's not what I do. I make records for people; that's why I just continue to be consistent, where a lot of the other top writers, they kind of fell off because they started focusing on their own careers as artists. That's not where my head is at.

At 18, I got a publishing deal, so I was like, 'I can do this for real and not go to college.' When I was a teenager, my parents dragged me to a lot of songwriting conventions.

Everyone in the music industry is so fun and laid-back.

I never intended to set out and be a singer-songwriter. I just sort of became one because I put out my own record.

Put out great music, and that's that.