Cat Stevens Quotes

My parents used to park us kids at the public library in downtown Honolulu every Saturday. They'd leave us there at 8 A.M. and pick us up at 4 P.M. - so between those hours, you'd better find something to do! I sat upstairs in the picture room and went through opera, ballet, and theater books. I loved the photographs of people wearing elaborate makeup and costumes - they really pulled at me inside. I was in that library every week for years, until I was about 13. I had a rich interior life, because I didn't have much of a social life.

I've always had a certain fascination. It's basically paint what you know, and this is what I grew up with.

What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling.

After it's finished, sometimes I can trace a path that goes back to the possible source of inspiration.

The character of the monkey just grew from something out of his face and my granddad's personality. They fused, and that's what I ended up with! The monkey belonged to a friend of mine, and I saw that it had such a little beguiling face and it grew from there.

Some people have been listening to the Beatles their whole lives; I didn't discover them until I was 18 years old.

When I really started liking music was when I could play some of it myself, and after a couple of years of playing folk music, I kinda rediscovered those hits that were on the radio all the time when I was a kid.

The most valiant thing you can do as an artist is inspire someone else to be creative.

A place makes a deep impression on you when you're young. It lives with you. It's like your childhood. It fertilises the imagination.

My influences change all the time; they have to remain current, because they're the things that capture your imagination and make you want to go into the studio.

My memories of being nine or ten years old are especially vivid, since this is the time when you have a real sense of who you are - before the self-conscious preteen years start.

I get inspiration from my everyday life.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

When I made my way across childhood to the tinny AM radio, it was dark. Lights out. I listened intently. More intently than I ever had before. Something was speaking to my unformed-ness like a long lost friend. Something that I had never met but forgotten nonetheless. I was 'realizing' that music was 'different' from other things in life.

When I went to see certain shows when I was a kid, they changed my life. They made me tap into that place inside myself that I was unable to get to, so music is that tool, that bridge, and that's the kind of music I'm interested in making.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

I know some children's writers write for specific children, or for the children they once were, but I never have. I just thought children might like my sort of visual humour.

I'm a bit of a magpie: whatever I see or hear or read feeds into the songs.

I just find my creativity manifesting a bunch of different ways.

I have always said that I cannot allow the child within me to die. It's kept me alive.

It's the best thing, when you are in a creative space, discovering something and being enamored with it and excited by it.

It's so fun to make up stories, but I find that the songs that I'm most proud of came from a real thing in my life - 'Peter Pan' being one of those.

The part of the process that's exciting to me is feeling like I'm in a place I've never been before, in every way. Without that, I don't know if I'd be a writer.

To this day, that's what I love the most: finding and playing characters who are out of my experience.

I can clearly trace my passion for reading back to the Jonesboro, Georgia, library, where for the first time in my life I had access to what seemed like an unlimited supply of books. This was where I discovered 'Encyclopedia Brown' and 'Nancy Drew,' 'Gone With the Wind' and 'Rebecca.' This was where I became inspired to be a writer.