Paul Simon Quotes

I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

Sometimes I feel like I finish a song, and there's another song that I have to write in response to that song. Each is like its own separate feeling, its own separate universe.

I just play, and I'm always trying to write songs.

I found songwriting really hard at first, but after a while it was actually very easy.

When you find a song that you love, you just have to do it - why would I try to match it? When I wrote more of the songs in the '90s - 'Nick of Time' and other songs I was surprised I came up with - it was because nobody else was saying what I wanted to say.

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.

The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

'Write' is almost the wrong verb for what I do. I think 'compose' is more accurate because you're trying to make the sounds in your mind and in your voice. So I compose while I'm driving or in the shower.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

I can't just sit down and make a song in a day. It's only possible if you focus on the music and not the sound.

I just try to get inside the song and imagine what comes next.

When I graduated high school, I bought a guitar and, at first, didn't really think I'd get into the songwriting thing as much as I did. But after learning a few songs of other people's to play on the guitar, I got bored with that and just started writing songs on my own, and that's kinda how it came about.

Nothing is more rewarding than to take a song, create it out of thin air and then watch it affect people.

When I started to write a tune, I just wrote the nearest at hand, which was what was happening in my own life.

There's a song called 'All We'd Ever Need,' which is actually the first song that the three of us wrote together on our first album, and when we wrote that song I didn't have any real experience to pull from.

I genuinely find the most meaningful thing I do is to make music, but also to absorb some sort of creativity.

Usually when a song comes to me, I don't ask a lot of questions; I hear something, and I just let it out in song. It's like making a salad. Everything I hear, and everything I am, I mix together in a different way in each song.

The first time I tried to write was when I was 14, after I got an electric guitar. I put a song together, and it wasn't that bad! The writing came natural to me.

I only do solo albums when songs are screaming at me to be let out of my mind.

Sometimes I'll sing the same verse through the entire song, because the other verses aren't clicking. And when they do come to me, I'm in the middle of that same verse!

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.

I wouldn't just have other people write songs and me go out and sing it. I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.