Robert Fitzgerald Quotes

Would Alexander, madman as he was, have been so much a madman, had it not been for Homer?

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

I always write my music based on what is going on in my life at the time.

Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment.

I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

'The Odyssey' is the great tale, and I was really taken by 'The Iliad,' so I dig into those things, and when I was a kid I didn't. You've gotta have a certain level of understanding yourself before that stuff really starts to resonate.

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.

The way I write my songs is that I have to believe what I'm writing about, and that's why they always end up being so personal - because the kind of artists I like, they convince me, they totally win me over straight away in that thing. Like, 'Oh my God, this song is totally about me.'

The way I personally work is I like to write what I know, what I feel, and also where I am.

I can't measure up to Homer. His composition has survived for nearly three millennia and remains the world's most beautiful and mournful depiction of war. But the story of the Trojan War does not belong to Homer. The characters he employs were legendary long before he was born.

You boil down your influences to a soup, and it all informs you.

People always ask what my inspiration is, and it's never something that's easily explained.

I often draw from people in my own experience to base a character on, going back to my days with Mike Leigh.

If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.

My music has been inspired by true events in my life.

Yes, I do write poetry. It's very therapeutic. I'm influenced by Pablo Neruda and Gulzar Saab. It's all very personal.

I've been a huge fan of Adele, Sam Smith, and Ed Sheeran, and those amazing artists draw inspiration from their present and past experiences; they write songs from their heart.

Every song I've written, it's about what I've gone through, good or bad. It kind of comes out of me, and I'm grateful for that. I've got friends who are back home who've got no way to express that, and they're kind of in a different position in life. It's alarming to me that I've written something on my bedroom floor when I was 19 or something, and then there's 50,000 people that know the words, and they've got a similar feeling. If you thought about it too much, your head would blow up.

I try to think about me, as an audience member, and it [inspiration for movies] comes from there.

I'm not really a guy who draws on things from my own past.

Everyone always asks me who my muse is, or who's the girl I have in mind, which is such a hard question for me to answer because I feel like it's a sensibility that varies for each individual.

There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.

writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.