Natalie Merchant Quotes

I'd rather break stones on the king's highway than hem a handkerchief.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

When I was 14, and for the next four years, I was lifting and hauling 10-gallon milk cans full of milk. That will put muscles on you even if you're not trying.

Writing is hard. I mean, I sit there and work at it.

There's a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer. Because what it really means is hard, hard work. It means tearing your hair out. Feeling like your head is about to explode.

Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.

Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.

I class myself as a manual laborer.

When you write a song like 'Forrest Gump,' the subject can't be androgynous. It requires an unnecessary amount of effort.

A lot of what we do at Fox is blue-collar stuff.

I was in the cement end of the construction business, as a laborer. I was pouring concrete, and stripping forms off of set concrete, and pulling nails, and stacking plywood, and doing that kind of thing. I was in peak condition in those days.

Lyrics are really, really hard, I think, or at least they're really hard for me. Some people can channel lyrics faster. I find them very hard to find, so because of it, they take me a long time, and I really think about them.

I write really slowly, and my lines are really, really terrible all the time. It takes so long for me to get them to be where I won't be embarrassed to sing them, and then feel like they're great.

The most difficult thing for me as an artist, as a creator of music, is lyrics. But everything else, I just do it.

I worked in a chicken factory, in a steel foundry, I worked on the bins for a year or so. It started as a summer job, but I stayed on because I liked it very much. I liked it that it made you very fit, doing all the lifting and that, so I could wear short-sleeved t-shirts, which I'd never been able to do before!

The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not.

No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.

For me, filming is always like delivery pains.

I'm known for my strength and it helped that from a young age I was carrying around crates of beer or carpets and heavy rolls of underlay.

I worked in a watercress bed, picking weeds out of watercress when I was at school. It was awful.

At first, I was using my sister Susan's lyrics, as I could not write myself, only the music. And then one day, she and I had a fight, and she threatened to take away the lyrics from all the songs that I put the lyrics to, so it was that day that I began writing my first lyric to the music.

It's easy for me to write songs but hard for me to write an album; that's been my experience.

When it comes down to digging, can't nobody dig as hard as I can dig.

Unfortunately scripts don't chase me. I chase them. I struggle, battle, discard, pick it back, struggle further, plead with it, curse it, cajole and try to be clever. But it is invariably the script that rules.

Being a big guy, I've got to shore up the paint a lot more. It's my job.