Duane Michals Quotes

I don't really like to talk about what my songs are about.

We don't all see the same way at all. Even if I'm sitting looking at you, there is always the memory of you as well. And a memory is now. So someone who's never met you before is seeing a different person. That's bound to be the case. We all see something different. I assume most people don't look very hard at anything.

Did last night really happen?" One side of his lips tipped up, and my chest swelled. I'd missed that smile. "Depends on what you think happend." "I took my shirt off for you?" His eyes deepened. "Yes. Lovely moment.

If I'm writing strictly for others, how does that show what I'm experiencing or thinking? I just got to a point where I realized I could be as personal as I wanted to be and people could relate to those situations if they so choose.

What we think about Paris is a part of how we feel about it. Our idea of Paris is our idea and we don't know that that's not necessarily the way it really is. It feels so real.

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.

It's like your children talking about holidays, you find they have a quite different memory of it from you. Perhaps everything is not how it is, but how it's remembered.

I seem to have a natural tendency to want to share my own observations and feelings with other people, and writing seems to be the way I'm best equipped to do that.

If I paint something, I don't want to have to explain what it is.

It's a really personal thing for me to write a song.

The songs are about things that we were thinking and we wrote 'em down, and when you listen to 'em, whatever you think it's about... THAT'S what it's about!

I won't get into it any more than to say that there are parts of me in all the songs that I write.

I love when people mirror themselves in my music, and I think that's the whole point of it - not telling people what it is or how they're supposed to feel... but you having a relationship with my song makes it real to me.

It's not all the time, but you get a sense when you're reading something that it's no longer about boxing or the performance. It's personal.

Most writers write from their own experiences. That is where the honesty and intensity of emotions come from.

Watching something is a personal experience, and I think watching something that is dealing with a heavy subject matter, it's a personal thing.

On the second half of 'Under Pressure,' I talk about my family, and there are voicemails on my phone from when I was on the road that actually make up the second half of the nine-minute song. I transcribe them and rap them as if I were my sister, my brother, or my father.

I make my songs slightly abstract so that people can interpret them their own way. I think that's a lot more special, so you can hear a song and think, 'I feel exactly that way,' even if it wasn't written for that feeling.

Maybe family is an eternal subject for me.

When there are no lyrics, people can picture what they want. It's a reflection of where they are in their lives. Music becomes a mirror.

Like when I hear a beat, it might make you feel a way, but then it might make me feel a completely different way.

My dad is never far from my thoughts. A place, a game, an incident somewhere or an unexpected word from someone can trigger a memory, which then triggers another, and suddenly I'm thinking about him, if only for a minute or two.

However, I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture. What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making, the relation of that picture to others I have made and, more generally, its relation to others I have experienced.

Awareness means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing in one's own way and not the way one was taught.