Gwen Stefani Quotes

The roughest part for me when I'm writing a song is staring at a blank page. Where am I going from here? If you're a songwriter, you have to do that every time you start a song.

When I have just sat down and tried to write the lyrics of a song, usually about half of it sounds like bullshit. I just have to go away from something and come back to it again later. I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.

It's a really big struggle for me to write a song. Songs take either 30 seconds for me to write or a year or two to piece together, depending on the song and how I'm feeling on any given day. I don't really like to write music at all unless I am completely unbothered by touring.

When I start writing songs, and they come easily, I'm always very suspicious. That usually means they're reminding me of something I've already done before. When the songs become unsettling, and I feel anxious about what I'm doing, that usually means it's going to be more interesting later on when we actually record the stuff.

I wish it was clear for me how it happened [stop writing songs], then maybe I could start writing again. But it's kind of an "it." It just submerged itself. Because the way I had always written was just that it came out. It just happened.

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

Maybe I can't write without painting myself into a corner first.

I used to feel like I wasn't a good songwriter when I couldn't finish a song by myself.

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

When you first sit down to write the first song, until you've maybe got three or four under your belt, it's always, to me, like a mountain to climb. You look at that one blank piece of paper and you think, 'God, how many songs do I have to write here?' It always feels like pressure.

There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

I'm never sure if I'll ever write another song, what the song will be about and if what initially sparked the beginning of a song might complete it.

I have a very dear friend, a great painter, called me up very upset, the work wasn’t going well… He asked me to come to his studio -- which I did -- I looked around at the work, dozens of sketches, drawings, large pictures, and I was very close to his work, intensely involved with his work, and he asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘Simple – it’s a loss of nerve.

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

It just takes a long time for me [to write a song]. I'm very slow. And it comes, kind of, by dribbles and drops.

Some people, like Leonard Cohen, write one album every 10 years, and labor over a song for five years at a time.

Songwriting is Hell on Earth. If it isn't, then you're doing it wrong.

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've spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me.

I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?

Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say