Alice Coltrane Quotes

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

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.

So much of creativity is the feeling that you're either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.

A young man, just beginning the study of musical composition, once went to Mozart and asked him the formula for developing the theme of a symphony. Mozart suggested that a symphony was rather an ambitious project for a beginner: perhaps the young man might better try his hand at something simpler first. "But you were writing symphonies when you were my age." the student protested. "Yes, but I didn't have to ask how."

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

I think that the process of making music is a hard one to describe as well.

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

It takes a lot of people hours to make music because they focus so much on one thing. I just do it, and I make something you can just vibe to.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.

I never have used any other artist as a model for a sound or a song. It always has to come from an emotion, and capturing the essence of that emotion in a song.

I can't just sit down and make a song in a day. It's only possible if you focus on the music and not the sound.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

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

I spend a lot of time working as a painter and in my studio I go from upstairs where I paint to downstairs where I play and record, so I get this thing crossing over.

Music. It's all creativity right here, right now.

I find it very difficult to compose when I'm not playing.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

I've already got notebooks full of ideas for new music, so I'm gonna kind of nurture that just like I do all of my ideas and perfect it until it's ready and then I'll just let it go.

Well mostly in song writing my experience is that there isn't so much inspiration as hard work. You sit there for hours, days and weeks with a guitar and piano until something good comes.

I mean, there are only so many notes. What makes something original is how you put it together.

If you're a creative person, what inspires you is always changing; it's always shifting.

Any new ideas go into PiL. My inspiration is everything that the human being gets up to. I don't listen to any music when I'm in PiL-zone, because influences can poison your well. Otherwise, I listen to anything.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

With music, it feels natural that, in my head, I can pull things apart and then put them back together very quickly.