Patty Griffin Quotes

I'm a writer, not a professional runner. It's fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

I'm always writing lyrics. I have so many lyrics on so many stray pieces of paper. Everywhere.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

Making music and writing kind of come from the same creative place.

When I'm in a songwriting phase, it's a phase. I don't just suddenly feel inspired and then write a song, because I always write with a co-writer.

I wrote 'Show Me the Way' in the morning and wrote 'Baby, I Love Your Way' in the afternoon of the same day. I've been trying to figure out what I ate for breakfast that morning ever since!

I write lyrics based on music, on a musical flow, and what sounds good at the time.

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

I have to be inspired to write a song.

I've never had trouble finding inspiration for new songs, no matter what I'm doing.

It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.

I am always writing music. I have got unlimited ideas because I have been clean and sober for my entire life.

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.

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.

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

I don't write songs, songs write me.

Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you.

I suppose that being moved to write a song is more applicable to me, I have to be moved, I have to have a reason to write a particular song.

As for me, I rarely write a song. But when I do write a song, like "Ain't No Chimneys in the Projects," which came to me at three a.m. one morning, on a whim - I get a percentage.

It is the melody and the rhythm that are by far the most important and then words and imagery and stuff, story bits will start to stick to a melody and that is the way I write.

When I get an idea for a song it would gel in my mind for weeks or months, and then one day just like that, Ill write it.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

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

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

I usually dream of melodies. When I wake up I have them in my head. I usually come up with things in the middle of the night because that's when my mind is the quietest. I always have my tape recorder, pen and pad by my bed just in case.