Mac Davis Quotes

You're always going to write and draw inspiration from things that you're feeling, things that you've felt. It's kind of impossible not to unless you're writing a song and there's an exact scenario that you're trying to write a song for.

There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

Sometimes my lyrics may describe a situation that happened to a friend. Other times, I create a story from the ground up.

I never dreamed that the little ditties I wrote about annoying customers or bagel recipes would turn into a full-length musical comedy. But a very wise person told me to 'write what you know'. So I did.

If I hadn't had that decade in the music industry and, perhaps more importantly, time to reach the point of being sick and disgusted with it, I wouldn't have written 'Kill Your Friends.' That book gave me my whole career.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

Whether you're starving in a garret or living in a castle like J. K. Rowling, I had this image of the author as a flawless, composed individual, serene in the knowledge they were creating art.

Writers to some extent are childish, and it's at the childish level that one really engages with any experience. What really moves you is at the very personal, childish level of the imagination. My business is the imagination, and my imagination is engaged by Asia.

My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.

Comedians kind of write what comes to them. You can give yourself little assignments, but it's what inspires you.

The songs are not necessarily autobiographical. A lot of songs are a combination of influences. It might be some part of my life, or something I've felt, or something somebody's told me. It all comes together.

What I find curious is that I ever became a writer at all. I grew up in the South Bronx, the land of poverty and petty hoodlums.

I always like to write where I'm at in real life into whatever I'm working on.

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.

'Slumdog Millionaire' is a fairy tale, but it starts in a place you really believe, and that came from spending two months wandering around the slums picking up stories and talking to people.

I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike - a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah.

The things I rap about are 100 percent real. But at the same time, I don't rap about those things to tear my city down. I give you the reality of what it is and what I been through and how it is living in those conditions in Gary, Ind.

Sometimes you don't really know what you're going to write about. I mean, there's times where you get into a writing room and it's a complete flop. And then there's times where you get to a writing room and you're like, 'Oh, I'm just on a roll.'

Mobb Deep's music, we represent poverty. That's what made us. That's who made us. That's who brought us up.

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.