Richard Marx Quotes

If you look at the content of songs people write, it's usually about the things they know best.

I'm kind of lucky in the fact that I can take something that's in my head and write it down, or I can listen to a piece of music that somebody else has written and try to tap into what the music's saying and just kind of follow that, you know. I mean, nine times out of 10, I'm just kind of following where the music takes me.

I am a songwriter. I do get to put my personal experiences in song.

A lot of my songs are about things that concern me personally, not a heightened version of myself or any of the characters that I play.

Songwriting has become such a big part of what I do that emotions and the melodies that accompany them blur into one.

Sometimes a song can be born in few minutes, if the feeling is right, some other times it can take days.

I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.

Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination.

Personally, I can't see how anyone can produce any beautiful music out of being angry.

People will come up to me at shows and tell me that a song touched them in a completely different way than I wrote it. That's fun. Fans translating it in their own way.

When you write songs, you can't really point out the exact thing you're inspired by. It's more a state or a mood or an atmosphere that you're trying to put into words.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I'd written? Yes. There's many of them!

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.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

I think good music comes from the heart. That's my belief.

Music inspires me.

I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

I could hear and feel music going on in me, and I couldn't get it out. You can always depend on a guitar.

I'm in love with music, and I'm pregnant by it. It's like having twins. Or triplets. Or eight-lets!

Music is an emotion, and I put it out there.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

I could write six songs in one day with everything that's going on.

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.