Steven Pressfield Quotes

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

A lot of things come together to make up a song. It's just images.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

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

I feel like there are things that inspire the music, and then there's the music itself. I don't feel like I always need to force them together.

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

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.

As much as I love performing, nothing juices me up creatively like being in my own studio for an extended period. Songs, ideas, even paintings are pouring out of me. My inspiration and usual subject matter: life.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It's like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.

I am going to write my symphony; I'm just going to start tomorrow.

The act of composition is a series of discoveries.

Composing is like making love to the future.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

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

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.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

It'll help you be imaginative if you listen to classical music. It helps you understand dynamics and how important they are to create an environment.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

I genuinely find the most meaningful thing I do is to make music, but also to absorb some sort of creativity.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

That's the beauty of creativity. It comes from the ether. I like to think, sometimes, it's like I haven't written it, it's more like I just reached up and grabbed it from somewhere. That song, 'Song of the Red Rock Mountain,' is one of them. I recorded it and thought, 'Where did that come from?'

Other people notice the same things but they don't think to put it to music.

When we make records, it's hard to pinpoint one thing that inspires a record. It's usually a number of different things that lead to inspiration or wanting to write something down and share it with someone.

Composing is sort of an intuitive act. You have to put yourself in the right frame of mind.