Intention

Your intention is to express this moment when things go wrong. But what you write about is a trailer court, and a blue car in a trailer court. Yet, somehow, when people come back to talk to you, they will say, “You know I listened to that song and it reminds me of when things go wrong.” They always understand what you intended. That’s the mystical thing about songwriting to me. We’re talking on these other levels that we don’t know. And the best thing you can do as a songwriter is trust the higher part that is writing, and don’t judge yourself or worry too much about it. Yes, the wrong word or wrong phrase can impede that process, but let it be. Trust yourself; trust your journey and your life; write the song.

Rickie Lee Jones

12 songs a year

Over three decades I've averaged about 12 songs a year. There have been a couple of fallow years and the odd bumper crop but generally I've written between 10 and 15. And by writing, I mean finishing something that was started several days, several months or several years before.
If you've written three or four hundred songs you get called prolific. But a dozen songs a year is not a lot.
Somehow the songs turn up, one by one. Or so far they have. I never know where the next one's coming from. There may never be a next one. I take comfort from the words of Thomas Mann: "A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
I wake up every morning and hope there's still one more tune ambling towards me down the road.

Paul Kelly

Summer Hours

I am more interested in how people try to deal with difficult situations — situations of crisis and grief — in the most decent possible way. When I’m dealing with this family I want to be close to every single one of them. I want to be able to understand their reasons. If at some point I don’t understand what one of my characters is doing and why, then there’s something flawed about what I’m doing. In theoretical terms I can’t analyze why I’m closer to this or that character in this or that respect, but in human terms I am with them, to me they are the center of the film whenever they are onscreen, and I can share in whatever they are saying. The characters in the film are, hopefully as we are, smart enough to understand that the forces that drive them apart are the forces of the transformation of the world, the transformation of society. And sadly it’s not things that we voted for or against, it just happened. It’s the way the modern world functions. It changes on its own. It changes like the sky changes, and we kind of have to grin and bear it.


Olivier Assayas

Unreasonable Drives

What we are is not the same thing the world requires us to be. We are full of appetites, unreasonable drives. This internal system of impulse and desire tests itself against the reality of social law — what the people with whom we live expect and require of us. This push and pull is part of the process that makes us human, and makes us interesting, too. You need some opposing force to measure yourself against and to define yourself either in accordance with or in opposition to. It could be the law, it could be the church or God, but you need something to be the Other and something to represent what is expected of you in contrast to what you sense you really are.


Scott Spencer

Novel

In the days after the memorial service, as my brothers and I went from room to room and handled things, I came to feel that the house had been my mother's novel, the concrete story she told about herself. She'd started with the cheap, homely department-store boilerplate she'd bought in 1944. She'd added and replaced various passages as funds permitted, reupholstering sofas and armchairs, accumulating artwork ever less awful than the prints she'd picked up as a twenty-three-year-old, abandoning her original arbitrary color schemes as she discovered and refined the true interior colors that she carried within her like a destiny. She pondered the arrangement of paintings on the wall like a writer pondering commas. She sat in the rooms year after year and asked herself what might suit her even better. What she wanted was for you to come inside and feel embraced and delighted by what she'd made; she was showing you herself, by way of hospitality; she wanted you to want to stay.


Jonathon Franzen The Discomfort Zone - House For Sale

Webb

What keeps you writing still? What’s the motivation to write?

I think I can still do it better. I never take it for granted that I’ve mastered songwriting. I don’t think one ever does. Usually what I do is end up hearing a song that I’ve written before on the radio and thinking I wish I could write that line again. Unfortunately, you can’t do that. Once you’ve recorded a song, it has a tendency to stay that way! I can almost always think of ways to improve songs, even songs that were big hits. I’m always working on them. I never stop working on them, which sometimes people find out when they come to my live shows. Sometimes people are very irritated by that. They come to the dressing room and say, “Why did you change ...?” People like to hear things the way they heard them the first time. You learn that you can’t really do that. You just sort of have to leave them alone, leave the mistakes in place.
What keeps me writing is the notion that I can still do a better one, that I could do a Broadway show, that I got the chops for that, that I would like to, for my own satisfaction, demonstrate that I can do that, that life goes on after 30 and 40 and 50 and that it’s okay. You can keep working and continue to contribute to the community and be creative. You can still exercise those talents that God gave you in your golden youth and maybe you can even do it a little bit better than you did then. It seems harder to get people’s attention as you get older but I think that most people do continue to mature and improve in their craft, even airplane pilots. There are guys in their 60s and 70s flying better than they’ve ever flown in their lives. I do it because I can and because I’m still pretty good at it and even now I think I can be better at it.



Jimmy Webb

Machismo

"machismo is not the easiest cloak to wear, the easiest role to assume in life. Machismo is a ladder, and there's always a guy who's more macho than you coming up that ladder. I've never had any illusion that I was high up that slope, and it's a desperate slope, because if you get to the top, you're dead. Macho means taking the dares that come your way, and if you take every dare that comes your way, sooner or later you're gonna be dead."

Norman Mailer