Gza Quotes

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

I love working and writing new songs. But sometimes you need to wait, to have something in your mind, and then you can let yourself play music.

It's true when they say songwriting is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. In truth, what happens is... songs comes through you.

I just get an idea and then all of a sudden I've got a song.

Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less.

I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.

I don't think I've ever spent more than an hour on any one song, but that doesn't count the thinking that goes on beforehand.

It doesn't necessarily take four years to write a good piece of music. It might take four hours. It just depends on when your inspiration comes.

Songwriting is never one thing. I've spent as long as three months writing a song. Other times I've done it in twenty minutes.

It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. I like when it's really organic, so I try to knock it out in one shot.

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.

I found songwriting really hard at first, but after a while it was actually very easy.

The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

But then you have to write a song, so at that point, I picked up the reins and started to write lyrics.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

I can't just sit down and make a song in a day. It's only possible if you focus on the music and not the sound.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

I love writing music, but it seems I'm always writing words, so I don't get much time to do it.

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

Every song I've written is luck, I think; it's luck - 'How did that just happen?'

Finding fresh song topics can sometimes be quite difficult.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

I knew there was something about 'Sun Medallion,' in particular, because I just had to record it the second I wrote it.

As a songwriter, you might write every day and throughout the course of a year you might get four songs that are really special.