A Quote by Grace Paley
I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.
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My philosophy on writing a song for myself is that I always, always, always want to write a song. I always want to write a song. I realize that as a record producer or a singer or whatever I might not, if I recorded on myself or someone else, the first time out I might not give it the right treatment, so that the world or many people will accept it and it'll be a public hit, or anything like that.
Some actors count their lines as soon as they receive a script. I'm the opposite. I try to see how many lines I can whittle down. You can say just as much in 4 as you can in 14.
Sometimes it's not like I write very specific, it's more like I add an atmosphere almost to something that might have been quite awkward in my mind from the beginning. Something has happened and I want to force myself to think of it in a more positive way. And then I force myself to write something that convinces me that this is actually something pretty good or something that I learned something valuable from.
When I write a song, I want to write something that is really catchy and says something that might actually touch somebody.
If you want to write, then write; if you don't want to write, then don't write. I fell into the former category, and I just made the decision that I'd keep on because I liked it and might someday do something decent.
Sometimes when you grieve, you grieve at a time where you don't really expect it. You might hear a song or you might smell something or see something that might trigger something, and all of a sudden you get hit with this rush of emotion.
I wanted to write plays. I was at Yale graduate school at the time for English literature, not for acting... I liked the idea of collaboration, and I thought if I'm gonna write plays, I should learn something about speaking the lines that I might try to write.
I think it's good to have a balance. Everything I write about, it's not something I necessarily might have went through, there's songs where I might have an idea, sometimes it might be a melody or something that I like, I make up a story to go with that melody. But I do think it's most important to have honest songs.
Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States succeeded in its great and historic mission--it globalized the world. But along the way, they might write, it forgot to globalize itself.
I think part of the problem sometimes is that there's so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.
As a songwriter, you might write every day and throughout the course of a year you might get four songs that are really special.
What do you really want? Sit down and write it out on a piece of paper, write it in the present tense. You might begin by writing, 'I am so happy and grateful now that...' and then explain how you want your life to be in every area.
Sometimes I start with lyrics - rarely - but sometimes I might have an idea for some lyrics that I wanna say. I write them down and figure out how to use that in a melody to write a song.
No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
Sometimes one of us might be missing because we might be away or something, but there's always four or five.
I sometimes try to write something that is actually really simple and I can't do it. So, then, it's not simple anymore. It's really hard and it gets all messed up. I sometimes sit down and try to write a song with just three chords and it doesn't work.
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