writers block

• "Hollywoodization": This is the process where things are evened out, rationalized, nicely lit from all sides, carefully balanced, studiously tested against all known formulae, referred to several committees, and finally made triumphantly unnoticeable. Brian Eno

• Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change. Wayne Dyer

• Write as if you've discovered a very dusty inscribed stone somewhere, and you're trying to scrape off all the muck to find out what's underneath it, and you keep coming up with one word here, another one there, and you're trying to imagine what might be in between those words.
  
  The only temptation to resist is the temptation to fall into a simple meaning. Brian Eno

• Art is never finished, only abandoned. Leonardo da Vinci

• Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. Erich Fromm

• Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder.
  
  Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you. Figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer. Barbara Kingsolver

• I write by twiddling the strings into a different tuning - I throw it open to the cosmos.
  
  Then when you discover something that has an element of divine intervention, it's like a blessing. Joni Mitchell

• The most important thing in a piece of music is to seduce people to the point where they start searching.
  
  If the music doesn't do that, it doesn't do anything. If it just presents itself and just sits there, if it either declares itself too clearly or is too obscure to even appear to be saying anything, then it seems to me to have failed.
  
  Sitting on that line is very interesting. Brian Eno

• If you can't write anymore right now, don't worry. You're not supposed to write anymore right now. Danielle Egnew

• A lot of songs you write are just for exercise -- just pencil sharpeners. Harlan Howard

• Artists who don't censor their own work: Picasso, Miles Davis, Prince. They're all people who just put it out, and have almost no critical self-censorship. They say, "Let the market decide; let the world decide." You might not be the best person to judge it.
  
  That's a kind of humility, actually: it's a mixture of arrogance, which says, "I know I'm fucking good." But a humility, which says, "I'm not the person to decide." Brian Eno

• Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught. Paul Desmond

• Only play what you hear. If you don't hear anything, don't play anything. Chick Corea

• There are two ways of being an artist. One is to really explore one furrow - like Randy Newman or Joni Mitchell. They're people who've got one territory and they really, really examine it. Saying, "This is my language and I'll get better and better at speaking it."
  
  But I'm not that type of artist. I'm really thrilled by suggesting other ways of talking, other languages one could speak. Once an idea has been floated as convincingly as I think it needs to be, I don't want to go on flogging it forever! It doesn't mean I stop doing it, but I don't want to make it exclusively 'my thing'. Brian Eno

• The size of the writer's block is usually in direct proportion to the distance between your ass and your chair. Pat Pattison

• Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult: it can lead you to very depressive crises.
  
  If your time is structured you don't have this problem of "what am I going to do today?" Brian Eno

• Restrictions will set you free. W. A. Mathieu

• Two different ways of making things: the hard way and the easy way.
  
  The hard way is the way of the individual artist who establishes his own terrain, as it were. The easy way is the way of grace and the way of tradition, where you don't even consider the possibility that you are there to make major innovations - you're there to make 200 parts today.
  
  One of the things I like about gospel music is that it has that same kind of humility, that the people who are singing it are not puckered-brow artists. There's the same freshness and thrill that you see in all kinds of folk arts. People doing something that is shaped by a whole lot of quite unconscious factors, like the limitations of their own vocal range. Brian Eno

• Musicians and other artists interact constantly with at least two types of systems: systems of aesthetics (what will sound good? what type of music to work with?) and economic systems that reward, or fail to reward, their efforts.
  
  If you're confronting a set of results that you don't want, rather than trying to force the existing system to yield up a different kind of results, you might better spend your energy creating an alternative system!
  
  This could mean anything from establishing your own concert outlet for non-commercial music to designing your own microtonal scale. Brian Eno

• If you think of culture as a great big garden, it has to have its compost as well. Lots of people are doing things that are not dramatic or radical or not even particularly interesting; they're just digestive processes. A number of little things are being combined and tried out.
  
  If you think about music in that way, it makes it much easier to accept that there might be lots of things you might not want to hear again. They happen and they pass and they become the compost for something else to grow from. Brian Eno

• The only motivation I need to write a musical is a phone call from the producer. Cole Porter

• A friend of mine says that modern music is a form of space travel, because either you're going out into space with the music, into weird new sounds and weird new impossible landscapes. Modern composers...create psychoacoustic spaces that actually don't exist in nature.
  
  So that's one kind of space travel, going outwards. But the other kind, of course, is inner space travel, travelling into the strange new psychological spaces in our souls. Brian Eno

• I'm only 49 years old. I'm still in the middle of this whole thing.
  
  I don't feel like it's finished at all. I'm still planning to write better songs. Paul McCartney

• Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb. Pythagoras

• Good songs write themselves. We're lucky enough to take the credit. Danielle Egnew

• It's disgraceful how long records take to make nowadays. But I'm Mr Stingy, Mr Cut Through Options. That's one reason people like working with me I think, because I say "Do this, this is fine, we'll make it work."
  
  Exploring all the options is not the issue. It's making one of them work. Brian Eno

• The easiest way to get laid by a girl, or get rid of her, is to write a song about her. David Crosby

• Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working Pablo Picasso

• Often in life you are confronted by many possibilities. The best thing you can do is just go for one with a quick decision, then make that choice work for you. It takes you to interesting places with surprising results. Brian Eno

• Write a song that you know won't sell. This will help you truly clear out your emotional closet. Danielle Egnew

• Whenever I start working on a song, I immediately try to forget everything, to empty my hands and head of anything that may be hanging over from another song or album.
  
  I try to approach it like this is the first time I've ever played guitar. What am I going to do? The Edge

• Try again, fail again, fail better. Samuel Becket

• I don't think about the meaning of it all.
  
  I say, just plug in your damn guitar and make some noise. Paul Westerberg

• If it does right by the song, you've made the right choice. Robbie Robertson

• The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.
  
  There's no point in saying, "I don't have an idea today, so I'll just smoke some drugs." You should stay alert for the moment when a number of things are just ready to collide with one another.
  
  A lot of factors go toward creating a work: technological considerations that suddenly are a little exciting to you, some feeling or mood, a nice day, you just had a talk with a friend. All sorts of things will coincide - and that moment doesn't last for long. It's like things in orbit; they'll move away again. Brian Eno

• As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren't clear when it was just floating around in your head. Brian Eno

• The more time you spend on an old idea, the more energy you invest in it, the more solid it becomes, and the more it will exclude new ideas. Brian Eno

• Just write. It's not about sitting around waiting for the muse.
  
  The people who are really good labour over what they write. Amy Ray

• I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. Duke Ellington

• I really begin by allowing myself to make a mess, and then seeing if I can get out of it.
  
  If your first move is brilliant, you're in trouble. You don't really know how to follow it; you're frightened of ruining it.
  
  So to make a mess is a good beginning - and I'm quite good at doing that. Brian Eno

• I remember being with my wife's family, who are are quite shy. We started playing Charades, and within 10 minutes people are singing the theme from such-and-such with all the acting that goes with it.
  
  Because they're now in a frame which says, "You're not yourself, you're not responsible." I thought, that's not a bad philosophy of life. Brian Eno

• As soon as I'd made up the shape of the song, I made a plan of it on paper, sketching out all the spaces where I wanted words, and began running through it, just singing whatever came into my head. And every time I hit on a phrase I liked, I'd write it down in its particular place in the framework.
  
  Gradually I'd arrive at a kind of 'found' document made up of half-obscured fragments - and all I then had to do was fill in the blanks by reconstructing what I thought each lyric was about. Automatic writing, in fact. Brian Eno

• I saw Bob Dylan getting criticized in Australia by this guy who was saying, "Your new songs aren't as relevant as your old songs."
  
  And Dylan just said, "Well, I'm out here writing songs - what are you doing?" Bob Dylan

• It is the very act of "concentrating" on writing music which makes it difficult to do, since ideas normally arise when one is not focused but when one is "open" in some way. Brian Eno

• There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning. Pablo Picasso

• No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others. Martha Graham

• The scariest moment in writing is just before you start. Stephen King

• When people censor themselves they're just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits. Brian Eno

• The best chance you have, if you want to rise, is to give yourself up to loneliness, fear nothing, and work hard. Mark Helprin

• The mind is like a diaper.
  
  It's got to be changed every once in a while or it starts to stink. Jeff Kauppi