John Petrucci Quotes

You write about what you know.

I write a lot about other people, like family and friends. I look at their lives and relationships and think, 'Well, if I was in your position, this is how I would see it.'

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

It's a bit cliche, but you can't go wrong by writing what you know. Even if you're a horrible writer, your own knowledge and experience is unrivaled. Nobody knows what you know like you know what you know. The way you see things is pretty unique.

I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.

A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.

The way I personally work is I like to write what I know, what I feel, and also where I am.

Live life before making movies, because you cannot make films about life, without having lived one.

When I write, it's like choosing which shoes I'm going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal - but I sometimes have to put myself in other people's shoes.

My writing is a product of how I would interact with things that have happened to me or things that have not happened to me but have happened to somebody else.

Kendrick Lamar taught me that life experience is an important part of being a good illustrator. When you're illustrating a story, you have to go based off of your personal experiences.

My work has never been autobiographical. Although the subjects are driven on a personal perspective it's sort of elevated above me. I try to express something that is more a collective expression of crisis.

Everyone always asks me who my muse is, or who's the girl I have in mind, which is such a hard question for me to answer because I feel like it's a sensibility that varies for each individual.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have. Good and bad.

Maybe my life isn't great. We don't have all the answers. Look at it from my side.

My films have always had an element of immediate autobiography, in that I shoot any particular scene according to the mood I'm in that day, according to the little daily experiences I've had and am having - but I don't tell what has happened to me. I would like to do something more strictly autobiographical, but perhaps I never will, because it isn't interesting enough.

I can never watch anything I've been involved in, because I know it, and I know what the making of it was like, and I know what's been cut out and changed. I just know it.

I see no difference between my pictures that people consider amusing and the rest. To me, it's all serious work - they're just a reaction to what I see. I don't leave this apartment in the morning and say to myself 'Today I'm going to be funny and tomorrow I'm going to be sad.'

Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own, unless one is a farmer with a professional concern for the weather.

When you realize no one else on this earth can be like you... that no other soul may know the beauty, sorrow, light and darkness you alone are given to see... then you will, at last, be the fearless individual your Heart of hearts has called you to be.

You'll never see it my way, because you're not me!

Maybe it's good to put things in perspective, but sometimes, I think that the only perspective is to really be there.

Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.

Experience is only half of experience.