Robert Fripp Quotes

Everything was a song. Every conversation, every personal hurt, every observance of people in stress, happiness and love... if you could feel it, I could feel it. And I could write a song about it.

I'm not a particularly religious person, but that feeling of getting transmissions from someplace else, even if it's from your own consciousness, is very, very real. To me, at least.

I feel everything. I feel everything, so when you feel, you know you have emotions and everything. Music is a feeling. Music is energy, vibrations and sounds.

Eragon cried out, and in his desperation he reached for Saphira and the Eldunarí... and without meaning to, he drew from their stories of energy. And with that energy he cast a spell. It was a spell without words... His was a spell of instinct and emotion; language could not contain it.

Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel.

I don't find the songs; they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come.

Composing is like driving down a foggy road.

There's no way to learn how to write a hit song. There's no formula for it. You just have to have it inside of you.

Sometimes you have the feeling that some little imp is standing behind you and dictating to you, but he gives it to you slowly, drop by drop.

I have all these computers and keyboards and synthesizers, and I rattle away. For instance, with The Lion King I wrote over four hours worth of tunes, and they were really pretty -but totally meaningless. So in the end I came up with material I liked. We worked on The Lion King for four years, but I wasn't toying until the last three-and-a-half weeks properly. On Crimson Tide, on the other hand, I just went in and within seconds I knew what I wanted.

I don't think music is done by any means. I would love to do it again but it's finding the right thing.

I do more writing by myself than with anybody else. My best thing is sitting...around somewhere with a guitar, and having an idea. You never know where it'd come from. Songwriting is a God-given talent.

I don't really analyze my stuff when I write. I write about stuff that I'm interested in, that I'm feeling at that particular time. When I stand back and look at the complete work, I might see themes that run through the whole film, but I'm not really conscious of it when I'm doing it.

I'm not going to be like, "I gotta get this idea out of my head." It's like, "OK, here's a clean slate, and I've got all these paints, and all these brushes, and this is what I'm going to do with it." It reveals itself, and you take a step back and say, "What's happening here? Where are we going? What does this mean? Do I need to break it open? Does it need to just be what it is? Should it end now?"

The intellect is not the means of creation, and creation does not take place through the functioning of the intellect; on the contrary, there is creation when the intellect is silent.

How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and to be in touch with the miraculous.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the source.

It's funny how you can struggle with one piece and write a better one in a minute. When things come easy, it means it's good.

To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.

My discussion with Keith Richards about the creative process led me to believe that there's an invisible presence of a stream of ever-flowing creativity that we overhear-all you have to do is pull up the antenna and dial it in. This presence allows you to maintain your sense of origin and move forward.

For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them.

Music comes first from my heart, and then goes upstairs to my head where I check it out.

I don't type [when I write] because . . . I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand.

The chemistry was still there. To me, that was the biggest thing: Would the chemistry be there? Can we really go ahead and do this? And it was obvious within the first moment of plugging in the instruments that the magic was still there. It was a fantastic feeling.

All songwriters are links in a chain.