Neil Diamond Quotes

I can only write songs when somebody gives me some water to swim in. Otherwise, I'm a fish on the beach.

When I'm writing [songs], some days the pen just goes. I'm not in charge and I'm almost listening outside of it. That's when I realize that we all have to start looking at life as a gift. It's like listening to a color and believing that these colors have soul mates and once you get them all together the painting is complete.

I don't write songs, songs write me.

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.

I don't really know how writing process happens, how these songs are arrived at. One of the things I like about the writing process is, I don't necessarily know where it's going, and even if I think I know where it's going, it'll turn out different. I find that exciting and rewarding.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

Often I have to move my body in a certain way, like exercising, to begin to get into the right rhythm for writing a song.

When I do write, it happens really easily. I'll just kind of sing along to whatever I'm playing, then find a line to build off of, then sit down and write. When I do write, I take care of business!

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick.

I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things.

I was never a 'sit down with a notepad and write lyrics' kind of person.

Mostly, in song writing, my experience is that there isn't so much inspiration as hard work. You sit there for hours, days and weeks with a guitar and piano until something good comes. But the urge to write is something you have to have. A conviction, an ambition to write and never stop until you think, 'This is the best I can do.'

The art of songwriting is just stumbling your way to something really special, and you don't know what you're going to write until you are writing it. There is no formula. And, sometimes, you really have to work at it and hunker down.

I have to be inspired to write a song.

I usually start with a lyric and see where that takes me.

I've never had trouble finding inspiration for new songs, no matter what I'm doing.

Jeff always had a huge part in making a song a record. You felt like you were capturing lightning in the studio. It was never boring. He always was there to serve the song.

It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.

The music usually occurs to me as a complete sound, and then I have developed the skill of being able to translate that into a fully realized song.

I'm not sure if the next song I write is going to be about love or a song about a tree.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

It's true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is.

The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.

Writing songs, that's what gets me going. Not the drugs or the sex or the rock'n'roll behaviour, it's the music.

All of a sudden there's a song - there in your hotel room playing your guitar - and you write it, and two or three years later it will come true. It keeps you on your toes.