Alice Meynell Quotes

In other words, musicians know that going back to the Spoonful, what we were doing was not copying.

As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.

There's a lot of music at my fingertips that I can be influenced by. And just because I play a horn, I don't need to sound, or try to capture, what was happening before me. I can just respect it and learn from it.

Usually when a song comes to me, I don't ask a lot of questions; I hear something, and I just let it out in song. It's like making a salad. Everything I hear, and everything I am, I mix together in a different way in each song.

All the conductor has to do is stand back and try not to get in the way. Mozart is doing all the work.

The parts I enjoy playing aren't really available to me. So I have to write them.

The good thing about songwriting is you don't have to delineate between what's true and what's fiction; records aren't put on the shelf that way. Books are, movies are, but records aren't.

At this very early stage in my career, I want people to experience the music first and let it drive their imagination and their experiences.

I can't play an instrument to save my life. But when I'm creating, and when I'm making music, I feel like I'm the head of the orchestra, and I'm just waving my wand, and something is created.

When I go into a room to write, it's like I'm not trying to say, 'I need to write a song that sounds like Eric Church or Jason Aldean.' I just try to get the best song that's in the room that day. Whatever style or sound that may be, I'm not afraid to attack it at that angle.

It doesn't really matter what chords I play, what words I say or time of day it is, as it's only a Northern Song.

So, then, the best of the historian is subject to the poet; for whatsoever action or faction, whatsoever counsel, policy, or war-stratagem the historian is bound to recite, that may the poet, if he list, with his imitation make his own, beautifying it both for further teaching and more delighting, as it pleaseth him; having all, from Dante’s Heaven to his Hell, under the authority of his pen.

Being a musician enables a person to bend the notes and express things that are inside you, no matter what.

I play music - I write my own music, but I play music, just background music really, and just let it happen.

... The 'cleverness' syndrome has taken the place of melody. It's like everyone has come down with this terrible disease in jazz....you are always expected to do your own material, which is a strange thing to do if you're a poor composer but a great player.

There's this quote by a writer, Emil Cioran, he's a Romanian writer. He says that you should only put things in books that you would never dare to say to people in real life. So there is that feeling of acute embarrassment, or that you've been too revealing. I think it's some kind of survival mechanism where I never think of the reader, ever. Because then I would start censoring myself.

You may dream freely when you listen to music as well as when you look at painting. When you read a book you are the slave of the author's mind.

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

Beethoven was just music, and it didn't matter if he could hear it or not - he could feel it. He could hear it in his mind. He could write it down hearing it in his mind. He was just music. Yeah, he's one of my favorite writers of all times.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Sometimes I make films about scenes other filmmakers would leave out, so I just make the film out of all the things they wouldn't put in. Poetry allows you to do this more than prose, for example.

I feel in poetry there aren't that many rules that you need to absolutely live by depending on your style of poetry.

To me, as a musician, there aren't any boundaries genre-wise as far as what can you listen to to inspire you.

one reason why I like writing poetry - you can say so many things in it that are true in poetry but wouldn't be true in prose.

Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.