A Quote by Peter Maxwell Davies

If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece.
I have a huge music library and deliberately choose the piece of music to match the piece I'm writing. So, every book I write has its own "soundtrack."
I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion.
A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.
Music's always part of my writing. I think all art is interconnected. You can't create or experience one without its influences bleeding into another. In my writing, music's mostly something that feeds my inspiration and mood while I'm writing, but it's also taught me how to score scenes and even novels. The rise and fall of the storyline echoes the flow of a good piece of music.
Arriving at a simple piece of music is a very difficult balance because, in being simple, you could easily be banal, so maybe it's more difficult to write a simple piece of music than a 12-tone piece where no one understands exactly what it is about.
If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step towards it.
I'm always writing. A friend of mine once said, 'You avoid re-writing by writing.' Which is kind of a good point, because re-writing seems to be mostly about craft, and writing is just, like, getting out your passion on a piece of paper.
Whatever's going on with me at the time of writing is going to find its way into the piece. If that doesn't happen, then what the hell am I doing? So if I'm writing 'Inglourious Basterds,' and I'm in love with a girl and we break up, that's going to find its way into the piece.
A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.
To speak technically photography is the art of writing with light. But if I want to think about it more philosophically, I can say that photography is the art of writing with time. When you capture an image you capture not only a piece of space, you also capture a piece of time. So you have this piece of specific time in your square or rectangle. In that sense I find that photography has more to do with time than with light.
I started writing novels while an undergraduate student, in an attempt to make sense of the city of Edinburgh, using a detective as my protagonist. Each book hopefully adds another piece to the jigsaw that is modern Scotland, asking questions about the nation's politics, economy, psyche and history ... and perhaps pointing towards its possible future.
Another thing about creation is that every day it is like it gave birth, and it's always kind of an innocent and refreshing. So it's always virginal to me, and it's always a surprise. ... Each piece seems to have a life of its own. Every little piece or every big piece that I make becomes a very living thing to me, very living. I could make a million pieces; the next piece gives me a whole new thing. It is a new center. Life is total at that particular time. And that's why it's right. That reaffirms my life.
When I write music for a film, I'm not writing a solo album, and I'm not writing a personal piece. I'm part of a team of artists. So I think like a filmmaker more than a composer.
Once a piece of writing gets to a moment where it's not going to get much better than it already is, marinate it. If you still like the piece, send it out and see what others think. If not, it's time to put it away and forget about it for a while.
I had a very linear story line for this particular play, and I wanted to open the piece up a bit, so I started doing that with my writing. I would describe fragments of scenes on index cards, then move the card around to see how it changed the piece.
There's music every day. I don't think I could write without it. Not that I listen while I'm writing. It's more hearing a piece of music that I want to somehow convert into prose, as a creative inspiration.
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