Justin Townes Earle Quotes

You can't write about stuff you don't know about. You have to live it. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Live life to be a good songwriter.

I think that if writers don't speak about real life, it's because they don't know it.

I'd say most of my songs I write from personal experience. When I feel like I don't have any inspiration in my personal life, I think about others that are close to me and maybe what they're going through or even just people I've come across, acquaintances.

I write about my life and my own experience, but I also write about things that I have no knowledge of whatsoever.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

It's weird to try to write lyrics for somebody else. They can't really get behind what you're saying or what you want them to say because they didn't experience it.

Mr. Fantasy was the only song that was scribbling on a piece of paper.

I found out a long time ago that if I didn't have a good story for a song, I could just make one up! Now it seems over half the stories in my show are made up. The funny thing is, those seem to be the ones that resonate the most with the audiences.

I'll write lines or words in a notepad. You work on little things and little parts; sometimes they turn into bigger songs.

If I'm writing a song for Karen Harding, I know I can't impose what I want to say onto her. I literally have to get into her headspace and think, 'what does she want to say?' When it comes to my stuff, it's the same. What can I write that's true to me?

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

The best songwriting comes from being as creative as you can and editing it down to the good bits, essentially.

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?

When I'm writing a song, I try to be the character.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

Novels aren't pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it's a good starting place for me.

The first song I wrote was called 'You,' and it was a love song about somebody who didn't even exist.

I think I've lived a pretty hard life. What I mean by hard is that... I've been kind of reckless with things. I'm a passionate person. I'm a super passionate person. I think there's definitely been sorrow in my life, good and bad. I think it comes through. I hope it comes through in my writing because to me that's what artistry is.