Franz Liszt Quotes

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.

I don't get my inspiration from a specific source. It's more like if you listen to a good tune, it gives me inspiration to write a better tune.

I'm a songwriter. Everything affects me.

I probably get most of my inspiration through music.

I've been ripping the Rolling Stones off with every song I write in some form or another.

It's weird: I don't really know where I pull my inspiration from. I think it's N.E.R.D.

If I'm not writing, I can download a newer album everybody's making a fuss about. But when I'm writing, I keep myself in my own zone - I worry about listening to new music that'll inform me too much. I'm the kind of person who goes to another country and starts speaking in an accent after three days.

I try to listen to as much as possible. I know some people really try to avoid music when they're writing and recording, but I am very inspired by so many different musicians, and I need to learn.

It's a funny thing with the inspiration thing. There's always loads of music around that I absolutely love and films going back to when I started making film music in the mid-80's.

Anytime something becomes a success in this way you always get imitators. I'm an imitator of the guys I love. I imitate people like Frank Miller, who is a huge inspiration to me.

One of our favorite Joe Strummer quotes was, "No input, no output." Meaning, we're going to hear a band, we're going to go to a museum, or we're going to go hang out with some writer that we admire. We're going to get some input, because if we don't, then we have nothing. It's a circle. It's a respiratory thing.

How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern of an evening and writes some fresh music. For he lives while he is creating.

Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It's sort of the way dreams come to us and the way that we get knowledge from them, through television, old movies, which I watch a lot of. Lines of dialogue suddenly seem to be part of a poem.

When I do music I don't do it with a purpose in mind. I just feel like it's a little bit contrived if you try to do something like that. It's got to come organically.

You can imagine several scenes from Star Wars? The way they looked? For me, that's how music is. Sometimes I'll be developing riffs for songs, just while I'm sitting around and not playing.

What makes Disney movies and Pixar movies always so good, hey take time and they're constantly honing, and tweaking, and rejiggering things, and taking influences from every cog, including myself, that can help. Any place where there can be inspiration. They make every moment very layered and very rich.

I don't think about commercial concerns when I first come up with something. When I sit down at the piano, I try to come up with something that moves me.

If my serenade of song and story should serve as a pillow for some composer's head, as yet perhaps unborn, to dream and build on our fond melodies in his tomorrow, I have not labored in vain.

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.

By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across - each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip - is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

Everything can inspire me. I know that sounds like a cop-out answer, but I find inspiration in literally just about everything. As an actor, I have to watch people and observe their behaviors - this is how I create characters. My daily surroundings feed my work, whether it's something I'm working on right now or it's something down the road. Music, art, landscape - these are all things I draw inspiration from.

Music was not invented by the composer, but found.

I write anywhere. I'm always banging around on the dashboard. Whatever I'm doing. I can make music out of anything. Whenever a song hits me, I'll pick some sort of melody or rhythm out on it, and kind of enhance the song.

I usually have an idea that I want to build on and let the music take me where I wanna go.