Jill McCorkle Quotes

Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father.' And you know what they say? 'I could never do that!'

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain

To live is to express, and to express you have to create. Creation is never merely repetition. To live is to express oneself freely in creation.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. . . . Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.

Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don't worry about whether you're "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

I tend to write and record things quite quickly. You can tamper with things for years, and it's artistic laziness sometimes.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

It's really easy to project this whole ideology of what being an artiste is, and I'm just not down with intellectualizing it. I just think, if you feel like doing something, then do it.

The songs come along at their own pace when they are ready.

There have been times when I'm writing about things that are personally embarrassing. Like any human being, sometimes I can't help but wonder - 'What are the people I know going to think about this?' So I have to remind myself that all is permissible. Art has to be a free space. Language has to be a free space.

The main thing in making your own music is that it's an expression of someone's personality and being. That's what people want to hear, and you can't really teach that - that's just something that comes out. Teaching just hones that.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

It is almost impossible to reconcile self expression with the creative act.

I don't really plan what comes out of my mouth, and that's what makes most of my lyrics entertaining.

Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen.

People ask, like, 'How are you going to incorporate what you do onstage into everything else?' I'm not too worried about that. Whether it's theater or a TV show idea, or an animated thing or, I don't know, an animated screensaver. I really just want to keep creating things. And I've always been able to do that.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction - they're always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

I've worked with people who wanted to be creative every day: it was like a goal to arrive with something very special. Sometimes it's just disturbing, because special is good when it's needed. But when it's not needed, it's confusing, and you go away from the authenticity by a strong desire to be unique and singular.