A Quote by Alexander Chee

I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew! — © Alexander Chee
I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!
I have seen in many cases that the youngsters are told by their friends and family that they sing very well, but that might not be true. When they are told that they have to work hard on their singing, they get disheartened. One must know how to take feedback from different people and work hard on his or her singing to achieve something.
I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimise the number of regrets I have.’ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.
I'm not going to try and change you mind." "If you're here, you accept it's my choice. This is the first thing I've been in control of since the accident." "I know." And there it was. He knew it, and I knew it. There was nothing left for me to do. Do you know how hard it is to say nothing ? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I just tried to be, tried to absorb the man I loved through osmosis, tried to imprint what I had left of him on myself. I did not speak.
The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since.
I have been singing since I was two years old, my parents tell me, and started to write songs when I was fifteen. Eventually, my friends and my parents knew that this was something I liked to do. They also knew I had a dream of making my own album. They have always been encouraging me to do something about it, and so I did. So I went to a local radio station in Tromsø, and there I got to record a couple of songs.
You're part of the human fabric of experience. You don't have to have cancer to write about cancer. You don't have to have somebody close to you die to understand what death is. Definitely, the more you live, the more experiences fall into your spectrum. As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn't. Gogol didn't. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Our own selves are limitless. And our capacity for empathy is giant.
If we tried to write about politics, you'd realize that we're all a bunch of idiots.
When I was 2 my mom said she knew I was going to be a singer. I`ve been performing ever since I was a young kid. So I`ve known I wanted to do this for awhile. I always knew in my heart that I`d be singing.
And what happened was, it's the same thing an older, more successful writer of ficition might say to a student: write about what you know. And what I knew - of course I knew jazz, but I also knew country, blues and some rock and roll. And that came out.
I wish I could write more make-believe. It's a lot easier to write about hard times and when things are going wrong. But I've never been a private person.
I always knew about as a kid, knew that that particular injury at [my grandfather's] finger had been caused in that disaster that killed his brother-in-law, my grandmother's brother. And he never talked about his own brother's death to me. My mother told me about that and told me about the impact on her family. And that's part of what you hear in the first verse of "Miner's Prayer."
I remember one time going out to the mound to talk with Bob Gibson. He told me to get back behind the batter; that the only thing I knew about pitching was that it was hard to hit!
I knew I wasn't going to write a record as soon as I got signed, because I hadn't had any life experiences. I was still at school, and I wasn't going to write about that.
["Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas"] is a very hard book to translate to film because there's so much interior monologue. The what if factor. I tried to write it cinematically and let the dialogue carry it but I forgot about the interior monologue. It's kind of hard to show what's going on in the head. I think we should do it like a documentary.
I knew I wanted to be a singer from the age of five. I've been lucky to be so single-minded - some of my friends still don't know what they want to do, and they're finding it hard. There are home videos of me singing and taking centre stage at family parties when I'm about three.
I've been told that I might make a good producer because I am very Type A, and I'm kind of a control freak, so I've been told that that might translate well into producing, so I would certainly be open to trying my hand at that.
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