There's been times when I've been standing in a line at a movie and someone's hit me with something really heavy about someone really close and how our music has helped them get through it. Even in our darkest moments we try and find something beautiful.
You will never love art well until you love what she mirrors better.
It's difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story.
Your life is a mirror. Life gives us not what we want. Life gives us who we are
'Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life.
When I started working with mirrors, it seemed to be the perfect material to stand in for that waiting.
That's the good thing about music: you can sing about people's lives in its stages and feelings. Some songs can put something in context that you couldn't. They can free your mind or can make you think or can be redeeming.
Memories. That's the thing about photography. I look at the contact sheet, and it brings back everything: whether I was tired, whether I was full of beans.
Man, I live out 90 percent of my songs and the other 10 percent... once in a while, I'll put myself in someone else's shoes and try to go down that road.
Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.
I wanted to write stories I wanted to read, that I and my friends related to.
I think that instinct, that storytelling instinct, rescued me most of my life.
Life is a mirror. You get what you see. If you project anger into the mirror, that is what you get back. If you project joy into the mirror, it reflects joy right back to you. Failure for failure. Success for success. What you project is what is reflected back to you.
My music does say a lot about me and what I went through. All the songs are about things I have gone through and what I am thinking. I wrote about my family, friends and boys, of course, and about life.
I don't see any of my records as any more or less conceptual than the others, and I don't really plan some overall idea in advance. The songs all get written under the umbrella of a certain time in your life, and it's natural to find themes that repeat within these periods.
I kept notebooks as a kid, and they were important to me.
I'm not trying to write a perfect record. I'm just trying to nail a moment in time.
I write to escape from my life. Writing about men separates 'me' from my work in a way that I find comforting.
Rap was more of a release for me, a journal.
As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.
After people work hard and cope with the pressures of life throughout the week, going out to a show or tuning in to watch some characters in cowboy clothes, singing and playing songs about real life is something I relate to.
Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.
As entertainment, fiction may offer momentary relief from the stresses of reality.
I'm of Neil Young's generation. Neil Young's songs have spoken to what it's like to be at least a white male of his generation over the years. Endlessly, he's sung about the stuff that I really care about. He's put into words the feelings that hit you at different transitional moments in life.
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
