J. D. Salinger Quotes

Basically my personality, and my talent, and my lyrics are so outstanding that what listeners can tell is that I put so much hard work into what I'm doing because it comes through my music. So I feel that my music for one will get my point across. I write from my heart and my spirit... You know what I'm sayin'? Some people don't know their place, they're just like "Oh I rap because I'm tryin' to get this or that, and I'm doin' this because I want to get money.

I love the creative process. That's always been the closest thing to my heart, creating something.

Anything that I write comes from the soul.

I have a desire to create more film, more beauty, more art, more love, but I don't feel desperate. It's not about creating or building a career.

I open myself up every time I walk on screen and give you everything that I am. There are parts of me that are in every movie that I've done. That to me is what my job is.

I'm doing what I do for the right reasons. I love the music that I make.

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

All I try to do is to write music that feels meaningful to me, that has commitment and passion behind it.

Relevance, for me, is about being creative and doing things that you believe in, whether that's music or acting or painting a picture, or whatever that is.

If I can't put my heart and soul into a film, I don't take it up.

I love creating things that come from my gut and my soul.

I consider myself first of all an artist. My work is about my creativity - why I create and not for whom.

Not writing would be like going the rest of your life without having dreams.

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't believe in talent. I believe in passion.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

Be the artist you were born to be.

Whenever someone creates something with all of their heart, then that creation is given a soul.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

No creative writer knows what is commercial and what isn't. You just write from your heart, you write from the deepest, creative urges in you, and you write from your soul, and you just either get lucky or not.

Writing for me is a form of spiritual discipline and creative vision, a means of being in the world and giving one's love to it without compromise or dilution.

I think people who are creative are the luckiest people on earth. I know that there are no shortcuts, but you must keep your faith in something Greater than You, and keep doing what you love. Do what you love, and you will find the way to get it out to the world.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements.