Do not

If, while watching the sun set on a used-car lot in Los Angeles, you are struck by the parallels between the image and the inevitable fate of humanity, do not, under any circumstance, write it down. Fran Lebowitz

Woody/Tweedy

"Being in the archives and working with Woody's lyrics definitely was a watershed moment for me as a songwriter, as an artist.Just getting to see someone so comfortable being [himself] and creating without a lot of editing.... [E]verything he wrote wasn't beautiful; everything he wrote wasn't perfect. In fact, a great majority of what he wrote was slight or sort of off color or imperfect in some way, and that is what is sort of beautiful about it as a whole. The sublime moment seems to be only a product of allowing yourself to get through, to get to a lot of stuff in your life, write about a lot of stuff and not edit yourself. That is a great lesson to learn for anybody that writes or creates in anyway, to be able to make something without being good or bad."
Jeff Tweedy

Driven

In movies the guy who almost drowned shoots up out of the water and into sunlight like a porpoise, gulping at the air so long denied him, relief writ large on his face. When Driver first surfaced, six, seven years ago, it had been like that, only in reverse. Sunlight, air, and freedom - his impulse was to dive back in. He wanted the darkness, safety, anonymity. Needed it. Didn't understand how he could live without it.

Driven James Sallis

Silence is a balance

"I'm not emotional when I play. I'm trying to mirror something. You see my creative process has nothing to do with emotion. My creative process has to do more with being a witness to all of that. Having a state of balance from where you look at emotions of anger, greed, and all this kind of stuff. During the creative process, there's no emotion, and in the preparation for the creativity, there's no emotion. There's balance. That silence is a balance." David S Ware

Most everything

A lot of songs don’t have much going on in them—

Most things don’t have much going on. Most movies, most everything.

Why do you think that is?

You have to see what’s popular. My friend Doc Pomus always used to say, “Look at the source.” When you get criticized, it’s important to look and see who’s saying that. I think people hear what they want to hear. People are doing that for money. If everyone ran out to buy this other thing, then that’s what they would give you. Although they don’t seem to up the ante very much.

Because they feel there’s no need to?

Right. It’s like Mission Impossible 2. There’s a screenplay by Robert Towne. John Woo directs it. And they are aiming so low that the audience they think they are aiming at actually laughs at the movie. It’s amazing to see people that good aiming that low.

Lou Reed 2011

Style

I suppose that, in a sense, you can't escape your own style. So, in one sense that's true. But, of course, I'm always interested in something when it isn't familiar to me. So, there's a kind of edge to what you're doing, the kind of leading edge of what you're doing. Inside that edge [are elements you] are familiar with, and are probably becoming slightly bored with, as well, over a period of time. "I've pulled that one out before. Oh, no, I can't I'm just fed up with that. Let's do something else." So, there's that, and then at the edge of things, there's some new things you're starting to do and to find exciting. And you always think "Oh my God I've never done anything at all like that before." But, of course, in retrospect, and to an outsider, they'll say, "Oh, yeah that's typical Eno."

It's just like I was saying about when you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they're not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work, I could easily write a very convincing sort of account of it that made it look like I had planned it all out from day one and that this led logically to that and then I did this and then that followed quite naturally from that. But that's not how it felt. It always felt [like], "Oh God I've never done anything like this before; that's so exciting!"

Brian Eno

Boredom

Boredom - his name for the relentless enemy that has stalked him everywhere - has lessened with age, Mr Greene said. He has described, in terrible detail, the peculiar torture it once caused him. A young, and more despairing Graham Greene found his boredom so unbearable that, in 1923, he played Russian Roulette, alone, with a loaded revolver "to make the discovery that it was possible to enjoy again the visible world by risking its total loss." It was boredom too that made Mr. Greene once insist that a dentist extract a healthy tooth because he so wanted the ether that was used.

from profile of Graham Greene by Gloria Emerson, March 1978, Rolling Stone