Roger Waters Quotes

If you look at the content of songs people write, it's usually about the things they know best.

When people go through tragic circumstances, it's not that there is no love there, but it's so hard to deal with and sometimes the gap starts to happen.

I write about what happens in my life - and my dad's passing was a huge blow to me.

My mom died of cancer when I was really young. I'm not someone who tries to work out their own stuff with a role, but I think that happened despite my best efforts to keep myself separate from it.

Obviously, I got very lucky that even though I lost my mother, I lost her later in life, but it's still had a profound effect on me.

I wrote my first song when I was six or seven, a silly little song. But I used to write poems in high school - not songs.

From time to time, I'll look back through the personal journals I've scribbled in throughout my life, the keepers of my raw thoughts and emotions. The words poured forth after my dad died, when I went through a divorce, and after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. There are so many what-ifs scribbled on those pages.

The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.

In about an 18-month period, my mother got sick and died, and then I had a freak illness less than a year later and almost died myself. And I found in both of those situations that there was this expectation to have a kind of transformative experience.

You have people come into your life shockingly and surprisingly. You have losses that you never thought you'd experience. You have rejection and you have learn how to deal with that and how to get up the next day and go on with it.

Because I had a lot of emotional upheaval in my life, I'm attracted to stories about characters whose lives are full of wounds and secrets. I'm not interested in who's going to ask me to the prom. I never went to a prom.

Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.

Cancer is a very sad thing, but you can always take something from every experience.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.

If I'm going to be a pessimist, then I should just stop writing for young people because that's too heavy a burden to put on young readers. But also, I get to meet with people who have waded through horrible things, and they get up every morning, and they try to do their best.

As a novelist, I have always been interested in how people come to terms with difficult, life-altering events.

I think everybody has their pain. For me, the time that I really had to grow up was when I was 15 and I had my best friend die of leukemia. Watching somebody so strong go through that is definitely something that will give you a little bit of depth. There have been a lot of things that have happened in my life that has forced me to grow up.

In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

Losing my father at a tender age was extremely important in being able to accept what happened to me later when I became a quadriplegic.

I think some of the best songs are written in love and then out of love. That's the best time to put something together.

I'm not like a professional writer with professional skills. Songs kind of come into my head the same way they did when I was a kid. I say I'm an overgrown kindergarten kid. I work on songs.

I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void: the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning.

There have been bumps, but everything has happened for a reason - maybe apart from the loss of some loved ones - and we have always tried to find a positive from it.