Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotes

I was writing tons of music in my spare time. I might be on location somewhere, and I'd go home and I'd have my guitar and my little keyboard or something and write music. Or if I was at home, on my piano. I've always been a late bloomer with a lot of things, just in general, so I think this was something that needed to come to fruition in this particular way.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

I had always been more interested in playing and improvising than sitting down at a desk and writing out a piece. I'd always found it more fun to play, and the other a little bit tedious. I always had trouble with the decisions.

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

I love putting the music together. It's like art.

I write my music.

I don't sit down to write a song, per se.

When I was a kid, I wrote music - from the age of 11 until the age of 18.

I've got more creative control when I do music.

My main thing is just to keep writing. I've been doing some songwriting that's for my own record, I suppose.

I write a lot of rhymes, but I don't really end up using them a lot of times, and I end up just freestyling. I like to write music, though, more than I like to freestyle, to be honest.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

Ah, 'Pather Panchali' was the most inspiring film that I wrote music for, and it was so spontaneously done. I saw the film, composed on the spot, along with myself and only four other musicians, and everything was done within 4-1/2 hours, I think an all-time record anywhere.

I wrote music as soon as I knew notation.

Ultimately, I'm a fan of music. I describe writing music sometimes as hieroglyphics, like, you know, excavating, gently brushing off these artifacts and discovering the song underneath it all. It seems as if it is already written in it.

And after I compose my programs, but it is very easy because I look to the music in a very natural way without fuss, and so I look always music, in my home, like books and books and books, choose books and you read the pages, so I do this with music, and I make programs.

It wasn't my natural inclination to get into writing protest songs.

Ever since Two Daughters I've been composing my own music.

I got tired of depending on other people, and I had this strong desire to make music of my own. I decided to start writing my own tunes and just see what could happen.

I wasn't really writing with anything commercial in mind I just wanted to create some new music.

Composing is what I love most from what I do. Each genre has a unique expression that you cannot supplant with another. All the records co-inspire each other though they are not tied conceptually in any way to another.

It is easy to write unthinking music.

For me, the music dictates the melody. Give me a riff to sing over, you know?