Gloria Estefan Quotes

Ever since I can remember, I've always wanted to tell stories, but I never had the patience to sit down at a typewriter and write short stories or anything like that. I started writing songs as a way of communicating ideas the best way I could.

Writing songs always trumps whatever else was on the schedule, it really is the most important and can be so fickle, you have to grab it when it's there.

I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

When you're an artist you're speaking about life, you're talking about your experience here on the planet. So essentially, that's what I do when I'm writing songs.

What happens is, especially when I was writing for my band, Creedence, and it's the way I write now, I go into "guitar lick" mode. When I do, it sort of leads into a real song. I'd say to myself, your songwriting is coming up with a guitar lick, and the rest is easy!

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

My main thing is just to keep writing. I've been doing some songwriting that's for my own record, I suppose.

My identity started developing through the songs I was writing.

I've always loved both writing and songwriting. The journey is fascinating to me.

I always wrote songs. Elementary school, middle school. It didn't feel more creative than speaking. It was just normal to do that.

I realized that music was the only thing I really thought about - music and writing.

I write songs on guitar and that's about how good of a guitar player I am. I can write songs on it.

I can put some chords together and maybe write a song, but I'm learning every day. And that's the fun part.

When I'm writing [songs], some days the pen just goes. I'm not in charge and I'm almost listening outside of it. That's when I realize that we all have to start looking at life as a gift. It's like listening to a color and believing that these colors have soul mates and once you get them all together the painting is complete.

I write songs about things that I'm simultaneously trying not to think about.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

I know my fans look up to me and that's why I make my songs so personal; it's all about things I've experienced and things I like or hate. I write for myself and hope that my fans like what I have to say.

Advice? Focus on the craft. Study the greats. Try and understand how and why they made the writing choices they did. Then, start by copying them...just as an exercise. See if you can do similar things. Learn how to write a song like so and so. Then, when you've done that, write a song like yourself. Learn to color within the lines before going outside them.

It's very easy I think when you're a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what's special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process.

The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.

I don't keep a journal anymore. I did when I was a teenager, but now because I write about it all in my songs, that's what I'm really doing.

I always thought of myself as the piano player in the band. That, I suppose, I'm confident about, and I guess my songwriting developed as I went along and I got a certain amount of confidence in that. The songs are like my kids, I'm proud of all of them for one reason or another.

Writing songs, that's what gets me going. Not the drugs or the sex or the rock'n'roll behaviour, it's the music.

Often the simplest song is the hardest to write.

With writing music and writing songs and recording music and coming up with stuff, you need to kind of reengage that kind of inner child to come up with interesting perceptions.