A Quote by Fernando Pessoa

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.
Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.
Sometimes you meet someone, and they seem great, they seem exactly what you're thinking of for the role, and then you put a camera on them, and they freeze. And other people come to life with the camera on them. I haven't discovered any reliable predictor for that; I think you just have to try it and see what happens. And, you know, sometimes the people who freeze, if you find the right magic word to say to them, you can unlock them.
My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them; and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.
I used to write my own versions of famous tales, such as William Tell or Robin Hood, and illustrate them myself, too. When I entered my teens, I got more into horror and science fiction and wrote a lot of short stories. A literary education complicated things and for many years I wrote nothing but poetry. Then I got back to story-telling.
I tend not to look back on old clips of myself or look at things I wrote or listen to something from the radio 30 years ago: I remember them, but it feels like someone else.
I'm good with songs I haven't written, if I like them. I'm glad I didn't write any of them. I already know how they go, so I have more freedom with them. I understand these songs. I've known them for 40 years, 50 years, maybe longer, and they make a lot of sense. So I'm not coming to them like a stranger.
I just feel like it's easier to co-write sometimes, especially if you have chemistry with somebody. It kind of takes all the pressure off of you. But, you know, I started writing songs by myself. I didn't really have a co-writer, besides my dad. When I see a record and it has a song on it that someone wrote [alone], I just really believe in them as a writer. I feel like it's a window into them, more than it is if you write a song with someone else.
I always see nice images like that but I don't know what to do with them. I guess you share them with someone. Or you write them down in a poem. I had so many of those little images, but I never shared them or wrote any of them down.
Many years ago, I was actually hired to write the sequel to 'Independence Day.' And I wrote a sequel. And they paid me a boatload of money to go write this thing. And after I wrote it, I read it and I gave them back the money and I said, 'Look, this is an okay movie I just wrote. But it's not worthy of the sequel to 'Independence Day.'
I wrote a few unsuccessful screenplays before I wrote 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.' I wrote them as television plays that never got made. I'm glad I wrote them - I think it was a good experience.
I have even learned to respond to someone crying by just listening. In the old days I used to reach for the tissues, until I realized that passing a person a tissue may be just another way to shut them down, to take them out of their experience of sadness and grief. Now I just listen. When they have cried all they need to cry, they find me there with them.
Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.
I was raised by muses. Women who had men in awe of them and who wrote them movies and wrote them music.
So many of my songs are based on things that either happened to me or to someone I know, but there are also ones where I've written a made-up story. All of them are about very real emotions, and I just find different ways to express them.
Sometimes my scripts get so dissolved, and they're so different from when I wrote them originally, that I find it hard to find what I wrote in it.
I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place. This, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude.
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