Harry Styles Quotes

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.

In one sense, every character you create will be yourself. You've never murdered, but your murderer's rage will be drawn from memories of your own extreme anger. Your love scenes will contain hints of your own past kisses and sweet moments.

My work is through my emotions, so everything kind of goes together.

The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.

I write to music, and Nina Simone is always on my playlist to write to. I mean, she's inspiring. She's truthful and real and raw.

The way I write my songs is that I have to believe what I'm writing about, and that's why they always end up being so personal - because the kind of artists I like, they convince me, they totally win me over straight away in that thing. Like, 'Oh my God, this song is totally about me.'

I can't write music unless I'm deeply connected to it and that connection almost always comes from some experience that I have had or am having.

Those emotions that are really strong, the ones that inspire a song, you can hold onto that. You can let it marinate for years and keep writing about it even better than you did then.

Just because you've written a song doesn't mean that you have pulled through. There are definitely songs where I embodied someone else's pain and that was purely to serve the listener because I knew they needed to hear something. But most of the good stuff comes from my life.

Most of the really good songs are dead true. ... It had to have happened to have the song be there. Every time I've tried to make stuff up it just kind of falls flat. So the majority of my work is something that happened to me, I saw happen to someone else, or a friend of mine told me happened. There is a certain amount of theatrical and poetic license. People are supposed to like it, that's why you're doing it. It's supposed to be fun. It's not brain surgery, it's heart surgery. They're just songs.

'Taxi Driver' wasn't autobiographical in terms of the actual events, but I did draw on my own mental state.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it into a song. It's more like you write what comes to you... You try to reflect the mood of the songs.

When you write songs, you can't really point out the exact thing you're inspired by. It's more a state or a mood or an atmosphere that you're trying to put into words.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

When I started to write a tune, I just wrote the nearest at hand, which was what was happening in my own life.

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.

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.

Being a good songwriter means paying attention and sticking your hand out the window to catch the song on the way to someone else's house!

I always draw from things around me that people around me have gone through... The story that could be taken really literally is not from my life exactly. But bits and pieces are, and the sentiment behind it is.

I write most songs randomly. They don't always deal with something I've been through but something I think is important to tell.

The songs are not necessarily autobiographical. A lot of songs are a combination of influences. It might be some part of my life, or something I've felt, or something somebody's told me. It all comes together.

You're in good spirits when you create and produce great music. All situations inspire music in different ways, man, from good situations, bad situations, depression, falling in love, falling out of love. I've been going through all those type of things.