Intentional Writing Quotes

The music comes through me, and I let it come the way it comes, and it shapes itself. I just hold space for it. I don't intend to write it for a purpose, but it comes as it comes and am proud of the way it can support change because I believe strongly in what I sing about.

I realized that I started writing songs to make people feel how I felt, rather than just making them feel something. That's not the way I should do things.

Every single lyric I've ever written I meant.

No man writes a book without meaning something, though he may not have the faculty of writing consequentially and expressing his meaning.

Readers tell me that my novels are filled with significant mothers. Do I realize this? Do I do it on purpose? The truth is, I don't. I think of myself as a writer of family stories. I write more often than not from a male point of view, and I usually begin by focusing on siblings, spouses, even fathers, before I think about the mothers.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'

When I'm writing, I mean what I'm saying - there's a lot of me in each song.

Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings, without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine-wheel. I believe that the cause lies in the fact that when people write, they forget for the most part to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the whole import and truth of what they are writing.

Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.

It's important to me that my songs actually make sense. So often, I turn on the radio, and I have no idea what the people are singing about. It may sound good, but when you listen, they're just saying words that rhyme. It's another song about nothing.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don't really think that hard.

I try to spend a lot of time thinking of what it is I want to say, and how I want to say it. Mainly because I know what it's like as a fan to hear music that is just exactly what I needed.

To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration.

I didn't want to do a book just to do a book. I wanted to do a book that, if you should read it, you might take one thing from it. Until that was clear in my mind, I wasn't going to do one.

I'm not a writer who thinks about writing only for themselves; I do always have a reader in mind.

I think the last thing you want to do as a writer, as a storyteller, is to create indifference. I don't necessarily go out of my way to provoke, but I would much rather have a song that triggers a whole myriad of reactions than a song that inspires a shrug of the shoulder.

All I try to do is to write music that feels meaningful to me, that has commitment and passion behind it.

I don't wake up every day and just write to write. I only write with purpose.

I try not to picture a reader when I'm writing. It's like trying to make a great table but not picturing anybody sitting at it.

I don't write books inadvertently.

There seems to be a strange affectation in authors of appearing to have done everything by chance.

Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.

There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.