Alex Ebert Quotes

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

I think a lot of songwriters would agree that it's often easier to find inspiration in misery.

I have been drawn to stories that are attempting to turn suffering into beauty.

I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.

Suffering is the price of being alive, and it is music and singing and art that has helped me live through some of the most difficult things that have happened to me.

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

Often I don't know what the song means until it's finished. Sometimes months later. I don't think that's bad. It implies that I don't know what I'm doing but-I think if you're able to follow your instincts, then that's knowing what you're doing.

Creating-that is the great salvation from suffering.

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.

You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it's the scene that wants to be photographed. You're merely an extra in the production.

It varies, I don't think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.

In the beginning, there was a kind of energy that - like an urgency to express myself, and the songs just couldn't be held in. But I think it changes, the nature of how that - what that energy is. And I need to court the muse in a much more serious way.

All those horrible, traumatic years I spent as a kid became what I draw from creatively today.

I was feeling miserable physically, in a lot of pain to the point where it was almost crippling me, especially creatively. I decided to take that and use it as an inspiration for getting out of bed and making something again.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

All the best parts of art come from pain turned to celebration.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

I think either you're creative or you're not. In general, I don't think you need to be in pain to actually be creative unless you're writing love songs. Then you might need to have some ups and downs within your emotions to start to capture that.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

My template for most songs is 'Is this inspiring?' and with the blues it so often is.

Every day you can write a song but some days there is just some magic in the air and something special about the catch; other days you write all day on a song line or idea.

All of my books come from pain.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

The great songs just come out. If it comes quick, just leave it that way.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.