James Lee Burke Quotes

Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.

My best days do seem like a distillation of all that was best about school. Write a story! Paint a picture! Write a poem! Make a print!

I hope what I do has an art to it, and as an artist you have to try new things and keep yourself entertained.

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

What drives me is to still feel creative and like I'm pushing myself as an artist.

When I started out, I was definitely writing about experiences that I hadn't had yet. The songs were just based on my influences, songwriters that had written songs before me and that were more experienced and 20, 30 years older than me.

Part of your job as an artist is to push yourself and make sure your creative juices are flowing.

You have to write the story that's at the front of your head. There is no point in trying to write for the market; it won't ring true.

What 'Twilight' gave me was years to consider how I wanted to work otherwise.

My first plays were amazingly bad, but I had a teacher who thought I had promise, and he kept working with me. I finally went to a summer workshop before my senior year with people like Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes who encouraged me to write from my subconscious, and suddenly all this material about culture clash came out.

Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems.

Being essentially a creator, I never set out to shock, always thinking about creating my work and not about the benefits it could produce.

As authors evolve and try to trace the precedents that have shaped their work, it sometimes becomes a matter of identifying the shadowy figure in the back row of the mental photograph, or of grabbing at the tail of a memory that's just slipping out the window into thin air.

I go back to things all the time. It's really nice, too, like when I'm going through some kind of a writer's block, and I'm feeling uninspired, I go to some of my oldest songs from over the years and sift through them, and one thing that's very nice is to see how I've grown up a little bit. A little bit.

Sometimes I write about my own life. And sometimes I write about situations I see my friends going through. Sometimes I write about a scene I saw in a movie. I take inspiration from all different places.

Basically when you're a writer and have a mind like mine, my mind has gone platinum multiple times, and I have got a heart of gold; my heart's in the right place.

I remember, when I first rapped, I was writing raps. I don't write raps at all; I stopped early. I don't know - it seems like every day I find something a little bit easier.

I grew up in this room filled with musical instruments, but most importantly, I had a family who encouraged me to invest in my own imagination, and so things I created, things I built were good things to be building just because I was making them, and I think that's such an important idea.

Inviting artists to do something, you want it to be a place where they're going to feel challenged and excited and that will maybe open up some new doorway in their own lives or their own creative practice.

If you're any kind of artist, you've got to ... keep opening yourself to new possibilities.

Think, the successful idea is always in your mind. Think it out.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.

The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form [and] knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration.

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.