John Lennon Quotes

I have some irrepressible pop impulses to write an appealing, concise song. And I also have some irrepressible kind of restlessness as well, and I need to keep myself interested. When I'm left to my own devices, there's a struggle.

In the beginning, there was a kind of energy that - like an urgency to express myself, and the songs just couldn't be held in. But I think it changes, the nature of how that - what that energy is. And I need to court the muse in a much more serious way.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

I can only write songs when somebody gives me some water to swim in. Otherwise, I'm a fish on the beach.

When I'm writing [songs], some days the pen just goes. I'm not in charge and I'm almost listening outside of it. That's when I realize that we all have to start looking at life as a gift. It's like listening to a color and believing that these colors have soul mates and once you get them all together the painting is complete.

I really admire songwriters or any kind of writer, painter or artist that says, "I'm going to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning and spend this time to this time creating." I do that sometimes, but the songs I like the best come as gifts from somewhere. It's almost like you didn't do anything, like you can't take credit for it because you sat down and the melody and words came out.

If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

That's the beauty of song writing. You never know when inspiration will come or how it will hit, you just gotta kinda grasp a hold of it and make sense of it somehow.

I don't write songs, songs write me.

Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed to sleep. It's always in the middle of the night, or you're half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them...

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

There's no secret, but inspiration has to find you working. And that's one of the key things that I've always remembered. And if I put my mind to it tonight, I think I could take a guitar, and by 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, something will have happened - I'll have had something to hang onto. But I think that's the key.

I'm very interested to see how this new painting will go - I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that's when it always works perfectly for me.

It's true when they say songwriting is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. In truth, what happens is... songs comes through you.

Making art, good art, is always a struggle. It can make you happy when you pull it off. There's no better feeling. It's beauteous. But it's always about hard work and inspiration and sweat and good ideas.

For hundreds of years people have talked about artists having inspiration, but often, some persons would say, write us a symphony or write us a song, on commission. The artists would come up with a masterpiece without waiting to have their muse inspire them.

I'm always creating. Whether I'm writing a lyric or making a beat, every day I'm doing something.

A lot of times, a bunch of songs have to be written to get to the next really good one.

What's cool about making music is when you create a record, it comes from somewhere.

You can't help but have ideas when you're inspired musically.

I feel like there are things that inspire the music, and then there's the music itself. I don't feel like I always need to force them together.

The songs will come as they come, and I'm excited because I haven't gotten to be really creative in a while. I'm excited to get back and do what I do and just write a song.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.