John Steinbeck Quotes

I had a certain career as an actor that I think was quite personal as well, and had a lot of integrity, but I wasn't writing my own things or directing my own movies.

When I make a film, the mixing process is very long, and you hear and watch the material in every form, so that totally shreds your ability to perceive it. So after the mixing, there's no way I can have the emotions or the reactions to my films in the same way.

Once I've written something it does tend to run away from me. I don't seem to have any part of it - it's no longer my piece of writing.

When you make a movie, it's just so personal and then you put it out in front of people and it becomes something else.

I just make music. If you don't like it, you don't need to buy or listen to it.

I never think of my audience when I write a poem. I try to write out of whatever is haunting me; in order for a poem to feel authentic, I have to feel I'm treading on very dangerous ground, which can mean that the resulting revelations may prove hurtful to other people. The time for thinking about that kind of guilt or any collective sense of responsibility, however, occurs much later in the creative process, after the poem is finished.

I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.

Music, for me, is completely self-indulgent. I write it, I play the instruments, I arrange it, I produce it. It's all about me - as it should be.

Everyone's different. I mean, some people write journals for their characters and stuff, but that was never really my area.

The writing life doesn't move in a straight line. I've had successes and rejections all along the way, at every stage of my career, and I will continue to do so. Acceptances and rejections don't define me. They're both part of what it means to be a writer. My job is to simply keep doing the work.

When I'm writing my album, it's totally my world. Even though it's myself and another producer creating the project, Conceptually it's more under my power and on my own terms. At the same time, it's a different type of pressure because I'm ultimately speaking, I'm solely responsible for the end result.

I try not to take on the weight or the burden of it. Once it's on the paper, I try to leave it, because I want to surrender to what I'm supposed to write about.

Whatever affect any of my films have on audiences, I just kind of stop at the door. I make them and I just don't go outside after they're over.

Writing music and lyrics that mean something personal to me. It's an exciting, intense, cathartic, this-is-who-I-am experience.

I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book - that one book every writer carries within him - the image of his own soul.

When I'm making my music, I'm writing it, I'm producing it, I'm playing all the instruments, I'm performing. It's my own world where I do what I feel, and nobody tells me anything.

Art should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works 'arrangements' and 'harmonies.

I'm rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work it's no longer his.

I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.

[As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

I don't ever try to anticipate my audience. I just write the songs I want to write, and hope people like 'em.

In the first two years of my career, there were a lot of restraints on what I could do. I couldn't wear certain colors of lipstick, like bright pink, dark pink or red; [my lips] had to be natural. Eventually, I stopped communicating with certain people at the label, and did exactly what I wanted to do. And that was to cut my hair, dye it black, change my clothes, change my sound. Really to just express myself.

I never talk about what I'm writing about currently, never. It's private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.

It's funny when you write a song - it's easy for me now - but there's almost a second stage where you take control of the song. You start writing it, and if you're not careful, it just finishes itself and it might not be what you wanted. It's very strange, it takes over itself. It has its own life.

Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew.