Quotes About Inspiration

Ask others the same questions you ask of yourself: "Am I a good leader? Am I trustworthy? Am I inspiring?

Ah, the bond between English boys and California girls. For those of us who aren't either, it's a bond that fascinates and mystifies. So much of the world's favorite music comes out of that relationship.

Big Star invented a vision of bohemian rock &amp roll cool that had nothing to do with New York, Los Angeles or London, which made them completely out of style in the 1970s, but also made them an inspiration to generations of weird Southern kids.

Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me.

But being born on the same planet as the Beatles is one of the ten best things that's ever happened to me.

My ears rang all the way home and I didn't want them to stop. It made me want to start something.

IF ALL MUSIC DID WAS bring the past alive, that would be fine. You can hide away in music and let it recapture memories of things that used to be. But music is greedy and it wants more of your heart than that. It demands the future, your future. Music wants the rest of your life. So you can't rest easy. At any moment, a song can come out of nowhere to shake you up, jump-start your emotions, ruin your life.

A whole generation of southern girls, raised on the promise of Michael Stipe.

five). The Esher demos are a real treasure trove; they mined it for years. Songs that got worried to death on the album are played with a fresh one-take campfire feel, just acoustic guitars and handclaps

But how do you start getting out of your room? I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, "The self is a cloister of remembered sounds." My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It's like he's reading my mind.

They asked me what sonically I could bring to the table, and I told them about this new gadget I had just bought, the Eventide Harmonizer. They asked what it did, and I said, it fucks with the fabric of time.

I'd have too much John ("Oh Yoko!," "I'm Steppin' Out," "Oh My Love," "New York City," "Nobody Told Me") and too much Paul ("Jet," "Friends to Go," "Flaming Pie," "Too Many People," "We Got Married," "Simple as That," "Hi, Hi, Hi," "You Gave Me the Answer").

She would wake up in the middle of the night and say things like "What if Bad Bad Leroy Brown was a girl?" or "Why don't they have commercials for salt like they do for milk?

One of her best songs ever is 'Annabel Lee,' which she just released a few years ago on her underrated 2011 album In My Dreams . It's a six-minute sex-and-death trip with a lyric from one of her hot dead rock-and-roll boyfriends: Edgar Allan Poe. The key line is: 'The moon never beams without bringing me dreams.' Poe might have written that line in 1849, but he clearly always meant it for Stevie Nicks to sing.

The Chiffons had so many hits better than "He's So Fine"—"Out of This World," "Why Am I So Shy," "I Have a Boyfriend"—and it's a shame George never got around to rewriting those.) Just

Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.

It's always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.

When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.

People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

I mean, the most important thing to me is imagination.

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks

Everything funnels into your book. It's as if you've gone mad. It's a strange absorption about this alternate world and the way it mixes with your real life… When I'm writing it's as if everything's in more vivid colors. Things are just more fraught… [Y]ou want to get back to the place where everything is significant.

Climb up on some hill at sunrise. Everybody needs perspective once in a while, and you'll find it there.

Garth was a reservoir of brilliant music, and I wanted to dive in deeply to learn and understand enough of it to appreciate its rewards.