Curtis Mayfield Quotes

I write because I'm in love with language; because I like working for myself, inside my head; and because it's the only way I know to make a stab at answering the never-ending questions of the heart that arise simply from the everyday living of our lives.

The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.

Joni Mitchell's someone who has tried to make sense of her own world, sometimes painfully, through song.

Music is my form of cleansing and introspection, so I have to grow in order to accomplish it.

I spend an awful lot of time thinking about stuff that's happened, but I don't want to be someone who's only writing songs because it's therapy.

I have all these revelations as I'm writing. Each song is like a chapter of my diary.

Selfishly, I make music for me. I like to make music. I like looking for songs. I like working with interesting musicians. I like producing records. It's something I will always do.

It's really such a personal journey, making a record, but even more so writing the songs.

Originally I was not writing songs for myself.

I don't investigate things by writing about them, but let them build up inside of me.

But I did that, and I created another blues scene, another something I can sing about.

At the end of the day, I think that I'm making music for me as that 12-year-old kid in front of my boombox every day. I try to think about, if I'm that little kid, what would he like?

Filmmaking is incredible introspective. It forces you to sort of examine yourself in new ways.

Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.

I'm always consciously trying to make what I feel is missing.

I wouldn't say that my songs are autobiographical.

When you listen to records like 'Foreclosure,' that's like me sitting in a room by myself just rapping about things that's running across my mind and things that have been bothering me.

I've been adjusting to what it means to be a songwriter, figuring out what I like about it and what I don't like about it and what it means to me as opposed to other people.

Coming off 'Reflection,' what we really wanted to do was be more vulnerable.

It's inevitable that if you write an album or a song, obviously it's going to come from how you feel. You're writing it for yourself, it's just the way it is.

It's great to be able to write songs and draw on life, to write truthfully, and to be able to do that, it's good to be exploring other stuff as well.

When I was making 'Xen,' I was surprised at how introverted some of the songs were. I wasn't deliberately trying to go quieter, but I had to embrace it.

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

Art is a game only if you playat it, a mirror that reflects from the inside out.

For me, I'm constantly writing stuff that is what I'm dealing with on a personal, psychological level. And I think that I bring that to whatever I'm doing, whether it's being an actor or a writer or whatever it is I'm doing. I think you can't help but do that.