Jake Shears Quotes

In 1982, when I was almost 26 years old, I decided I wanted to write fiction. I'd majored in journalism in college, and I'd always assumed I would write nonfiction.

There's a few times in the past when I wrote a song, and I put the words together, and they were very clear pictures, and I felt like I was putting together a really good story. But I don't think I was ever really able to stay on that. What I've sort of developed lyrically is more about the sound of the vocals and what they are.

When I look at the arc of my career, my focus is on lyricism, right? I own that.

I wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl - long before I was a musician and a songwriter.

I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.

After I'd been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.

Essentially, I'm a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.

I started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.

I'd always been a kid that loved literature, reading, writing - anything to do with words - so music was just a path.

I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.

I just love storytelling. I write music to tell stories. So when I'm done writing a song, I take it and go, 'Okay. How can I interpret these lyrics differently?' I love taking lyrics that were so close to me at a certain point in my life and then revamping them. I always want to take things to the next level.

I think I always knew I would be a writer some day, but it wasn't until I was grown and had children of my own that I turned to telling Native American stories.

I wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.

I've always been jealous of rappers, because they can fit so many words into a song and tell a story with lots of details. But when you're a songwriter, you have to fit the words to the melody and you can't fit as much in. I'm just a big fan of storytelling.

I definitely want to act and I want to sing. If those two fall through, I want to become a writer, probably, like a songwriter for other people, or a novel writer. I write a lot, and I read a lot. I like reading fiction.

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was four years old!

I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'

I was a storyteller for The Band. It was never, 'Hey guys, here's a song about what happened to me.' I was always more comfortable writing fiction.

I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.

I want a career writing these novels that I can be proud of. And then I want one as a screenwriter.