Roger Waters Quotes

I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.

I don't believe people when they say their songs have nothing to do with their personal life.

I'm not the kind of writer that can wake up and say, "Okay, I'm gonna write a song today," and have that song be the kind I would want to record. The songs of mine that I end up liking are songs that come from real experience. They're like chapter titles in my life.

Writing a song to be a single is hard, and I don't like to focus on that because you can get caught up in making something just terrible, which is really easy to do if you're focused on making it a single. It's more fun when you focus on what excites you musically.

I've done bits of writing for other people but when I'm writing music as Years & Years, I'm using my life and my stories and my experiences. I want it to be authentic and real but also to work as a pop song - I never want to just put in a cheesy line.

I've been a huge fan of Adele, Sam Smith, and Ed Sheeran, and those amazing artists draw inspiration from their present and past experiences; they write songs from their heart.

If something happens to me, you're going to hear about it. I only know how to write songs about my life.

I can only write songs when somebody gives me some water to swim in. Otherwise, I'm a fish on the beach.

I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.

There's no way to learn how to write a hit song. There's no formula for it. You just have to have it inside of you.

The last thing you want to do is write songs about being in a band.

There are times when I want to be plainspoken about my feelings in a song. But there are other times when it's really good to try and get my head around different kinds of song structures, or maybe I might get turned on by trying to write a song that would fit in this one scene in a movie. And by the end of all this, you just end up with a bunch of different ideas. And songs are really just ideas.

When I write songs I write for myself...I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.

This is the city that taught me how to write all of these cool songs. Yeah, you guys definitely need a royalty.

All of a sudden there's a song - there in your hotel room playing your guitar - and you write it, and two or three years later it will come true. It keeps you on your toes.

I'm not writing just classic-sounding songs, but songs that come from experience.

You can't write a good song about a whorehouse unless you've been in one.

Sometimes I write from personal experience, but so much depends on what mood I'm in. If I'm in a good mood, I'll write happier songs.

I suppose ever since I was about 14, I remember listening to "Sgt. Pepper's," and I remember thinking, "how do you possibly write songs like that?" I remember starting to try and write songs around that age, but just sitting around with an acoustic guitar, and try to come up with ideas for songs, and that's just what I've done ever since. I just never really stopped doing that, I suppose.

The songs that you start to write that you are a little scared of can be the ones that you have to tell.

I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them. Finally the Foo Fighters stuff happened when I just went to the studio down the street from my house and recorded some stuff in about five or six days, and all these people wanted to release it as an album. I wanted to release it on my own, with no photos and no names on it.

If I found out some gal was trying to steal my guy, I'd want to give her a black eye! Instead, I wrote this song. At the time I was writing each song [on this album], you could figure out the frame of mind I was in by listening closely. With every song I've ever recorded, I'm in it. I wouldn't write about it if I wasn't in it.

The abstract music is just more interesting because it doesn't really have anything to say, but if it is good, it creates thoughts and feelings, and I enjoy that. For me, once the music creates those thoughts and feelings, I begin to write a song about it.

I don't write songs, songs write me.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.