George Gershwin Quotes

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.

The best feeling I ever get is when I finish a song, and it exists, and it didn't exist before, and now it's there, and it makes me feel a certain way.

I can't write music unless I'm deeply connected to it and that connection almost always comes from some experience that I have had or am having.

You treat the air as a canvas and the paint is the chords that come through your fingers, out of the keyboard.

What's cool about making music is when you create a record, it comes from somewhere.

It's inevitable that if you write an album or a song, obviously it's going to come from how you feel. You're writing it for yourself, it's just the way it is.

I'm always working on lots of songs at once. For me it's very emotionally driven.

It is the object which aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and set of his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be imprisoned in his work for good.

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.

The first thing that inspires any song is a chord progression. When I have one I really like, I get into the lyrics even more.

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

The best part of making music, for me, is collaborating and working with new people and fresh sounds and all those things that gets people excited to continue in this business that we all love so much.

I write my music.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

I always write my music based on what is going on in my life at the time.

It's true when they say songwriting is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. In truth, what happens is... songs comes through you.

That's what I like to do, I like to make songs.

Music is really all about experimentation and lots of trial and error. It's just mind-numbingly boring until you hit on something that works well.

I don't think of work between albums. Of course, I go through regular life and I live and I experience different things, good and bad, and it does help me, but I don't think about writing or what I'm gonna do with whatever's going on while I'm going through it.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

Making music is fantastic.

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.

Ah, 'Pather Panchali' was the most inspiring film that I wrote music for, and it was so spontaneously done. I saw the film, composed on the spot, along with myself and only four other musicians, and everything was done within 4-1/2 hours, I think an all-time record anywhere.