Gayle Forman Quotes

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs.

I guess it would be if I wanted to, just lay back and predominantly write songs when I can't go on a stage anymore.

I love music. In a lot of my downtime, I spend time listening to other people's music or other people's rhymes and writing my own.

If something happens to me, you're going to hear about it. I only know how to write songs about my life.

Not too many songwriters, when they write songs go for broke. When someone does who's really good, it's astonishing. There's a reason a three-minute song can devastate you, or make you get up and dance, stop what you're doing and go, 'What is that?' It just hits you. And it's a very potent thing you're playing around with.

I can only write songs when somebody gives me some water to swim in. Otherwise, I'm a fish on the beach.

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'm not done writing songs about you yet.

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'm somebody who grew up listening to a lot of musical theater, so getting to finally write musical theater songs and songs that sound that way - the emphasis being on the storytelling, but the arrangements and the orchestrations can be really varied - I found that to be, actually, a really joyful discovery.

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

I like the process of writing songs. It makes me feel good.

I used to wish I could write songs like the others - and I've tried but I just can't. I get the words all right, but whenever I think of a tune and sing it to the others they always say 'Yeah, it always sounds like such a thing' and when they point it out I see what they mean. But I did get a part credit as a composer on one - it was called What Goes On.

I just being able to write songs I'm proud of and finding some women to play with is exciting.

The reason you write [songs] is because there's something you want to say that is important to you - enough to go through all the torture of writing.

"Diamonds & Rust" started off as another song. Then the words started to morph. When you write a song that deep, the words come from some place else. But when the songs stop coming, it would be so contrived to try and force it. Since then I've just been doing other people's music.

I only write about stuff I know. I don't have a lot of experience with boys and stuff so I write a lot of songs about interesting and strange subjects that people wouldn't write songs about.

Songwriting as an art is a bit archaic now. Just writing a song is not good enough.

Songwriting is like ... being possessed. You try to go to sleep but the song won't let you.

I just said, you know, this is a great track but this lyric, I don't believe it. It sounds like I'm trying to say something, instead of it naturally coming out of me, like I was saying something that I already knew. Anyway, I can't remember what it was. And either I threw it all out or I threw 90 percent of it out, and kept a line or two. That's happened a couple of times to me. Not too often, but a couple of times. Very aggravating when it does happen.

In the morning I'd write these essays, anything that I'd feel like writing, and in the afternoon, I'd spend time with my guitar. I had decided after listening to my last four or five albums that my biggest weakness musically was melody. the reason I had been singing in a monotone over the chord patterns in my songs was that I never practiced doing melodies.

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

I feel like writing songs is cheating on acting. It's weird.

I still don't know how to express the really delicate personal stuff. People think that Plastic Ono is very personal, but there are some subtleties of emotions which I cannot seem to express in pop music, and it frustrates me. Maybe that's why I still search for other ways of expressing myself. Song writing is a limiting experience in some ways - writing down words that have to rhyme.