Arthur Rubinstein Quotes

Generally, my life is absolute chaos, but when I'm writing songs, it's very thought out and regimented.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.

Genius is lonely without the surrounding presence of a people to inspire it.

When I write my music I see all the rivers flowing... sensual, spiritual, religious, animal, intellectual.

Creative Arts raise a person to another level of consciousness as if you could imagine life before words.

One of our favorite Joe Strummer quotes was, "No input, no output." Meaning, we're going to hear a band, we're going to go to a museum, or we're going to go hang out with some writer that we admire. We're going to get some input, because if we don't, then we have nothing. It's a circle. It's a respiratory thing.

Today, I find inspiration in music, art, traveling the world, and meeting new people.

It takes isolation and solitude for me to write.

People have been asking me, "What advice do you have for young writers?" I tell them: a) get off social media; b) don't ask your friends what they think about your work or your ideas. You need to focus and be insane within yourself to build your sandcastle. The mind is so malleable and you need to have a steel trap around it, at least while you're working on something.

Imagination is something you do alone.

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.

Lots of things inspire me. My friends and my family, obviously. I really like to travel, so very inspired by traveling and meeting new people along the way. Also, music and the arts, like film and television. I like to read a lot too; that stuff inspires me.

Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy—“to stand outside”—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.

No matter how many people try, no matter how many fancy songwriters in Los Angeles try to break it down to a formula... to an extent, there isn't a science to writing great songs, I suppose.

I sort of have various sort of theories when people ask me about songwriting because it is a mystery. You don't really know. Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't. It's really peculiar.

It varies, I don't think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.

People go, 'What do you want to do?' What do you want to do? What are you feeling? Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do—that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

If you think of a school drawing while you work, your drawing will look like one.

I wanted to write and then I saw Pierrot and I understand that I could express myself in a more... Also probably, I had an intuition that if I was going to only write, I will stay in one room all the time and never go out. I felt that if I was going to make movies, I would have to communicate with people and it would be good for me.

I'll get an inspiration and start painting; then I'll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it so people will know how we used to live.

When I'm traveling to promote my book, I feel like an artful impostor. What I really am is when I'm in my (painter's) studio and when I'm writing. With actors, it's the same thing. They're kind of artful impostors in public. When you get to know them, they're different people.

People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.

People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.

I focus on the words and then I have fun putting together the music after.