Quotes About Inspiration

Mostly, in song writing, my experience is that there isn't so much inspiration as hard work. You sit there for hours, days and weeks with a guitar and piano until something good comes. But the urge to write is something you have to have. A conviction, an ambition to write and never stop until you think, 'This is the best I can do.'

I ended up renting a studio in L.A. for about 15 months. Starting in January of 2016, some of the guys in the band were coming out once every five to six weeks for like five days a time.

It was when I got to NXT with Dusty Rhodes, being the creative force he was, and told us to bring our most creative side every single week. One of those weeks, I brought the guitar and started telling stories while I played, and it just evolved from there.

I haven't written an awful lot recently, but I think I probably will start again very shortly. Being so much on the road, when you have a couple of weeks off, you're likely to avoid sitting at the piano, and taping, and giving yourself more work to do.

Then, for a hot three or four weeks I wanted to be a concert pianist.

I put the storyboard down and came back to it like two weeks later and saw that I had written 'Butt-Head' next to the picture, and it kind of made me laugh and I thought, Well, might as well go for every laugh you can get.

When I was preparing for the film for tree weeks, with David Cronenberg, I had a lady friend come over.

Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don't know what that means.

We played some gigs in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago and it was the first time I really felt the group was really a band in the sense of something I could write for.

Most artists come in and out of the country, they stay may be 2 weeks - or a month max and then they leave.

I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward.

Writing a simple melody can take weeks to get it right where I want it, but I do quite enjoy it.

I'm thinking about a few weeks in Montreal to work with a producer I met there.

Rio in four years; I've got more inspiration in the last two, three weeks. I'm sure I'm going to get more in the Paralympics in the next coming weeks, so by the end of this season, I'm going to take a month off, and then the next four years is going to be good.

I'm sure lots of actors and creative people go through this, where you have some weeks where it's all going according to plan and some weeks where you're super frustrated.

I don't write a great song every day. I don't write a great song every couple weeks. It comes in such random times.

You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

Weeks go by, and I don't paint until finally I can't stand it any longer. I get fed up. I almost don't want to talk about it, because I don't want to become self-conscious about it, but perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself.

Sometimes I get in writing moods and I want to write a song every couple of days. Then sometimes I may not write a song for three weeks. It's just according to how it's hitting me at the time.

The short film project I just finished for W Hotels and Intel, I didn't have my script finished until a few days before we began filming. We edited it very quickly and now it's up online. It was great to conceive an idea and have it premiere just a few weeks later, compared to a feature, which takes a year or more.

I procrastinate in spades. In my defence, I also try to have all other distractions solved before I can concentrate on writing. My small theory is that to write for three hours, you need to feel like you have three days. To write for three days, you need to feel like you've got three weeks, and so on.

There's something fun about the road because there's no 9 to 5. But I do find myself making the effort to take some time off. As much as I don't want to, I have to. I need to reset. I love weeks off, because I can go in the studio and just be creative again.

When the writing is going really well, whole days and weeks go by, and I suddenly realise I have all these unpaid bills and, my God, I haven't unpacked, and the suitcase has been sitting there for three weeks.

There was always a piano in the house when I was growing up - my dad played, and I thought it was cool - and when I was eight, I begged my parents to let me have lessons. After a couple of weeks, I wanted to give up, but my parents were very focused and made me keep going, which I'm very pleased about now.