"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make."

"I love reading fiction, but I can hardly stand to listen to a fiction writer talk about his or her book—it's like a painter talking about his painting or a composer describing a symphony.  You want to read the novel, you want to see the painting, you want to hear the music—you don't want to hear a lot of talk about it."

Baby Driver

Flight of the Conchords

"I just remember getting bashed for them. But what is funny is that someone will bash them, then pick one out and say 'this one was the exception' and then another person will be bashing them and that won't be their exception, a different one'll be their exception. ... Some of those albums that people say were so bad are among my favorites."

"I hear what I write.  I started writing poetry when I was really young.  I always hear it in my head.  I realized that a lot of people who write about writing don't seem to hear it, don't listen to it, their perception is more theoretical and intellectual.  But if it's happening in your body, if you are hearing what you write, then you can listen for the right cadence, which will help the sentence run clear."

"I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we're all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist. And I think the mind isn't conscious enough to go all the way to where we're connected, but it's conscious of a certain amount of that territory. And when these ideas fly into the conscious part, then you can capture them. But if they're outside of the conscious part, you don't even know about them. So you just hope that you can make the conscious part of your mind bigger or that these ideas will fly into your airspace, so you can shoot them down and grab them and take them home. So that's all you try to do. Sometimes an idea will strike you when you're sitting in a quiet chair. But sometimes an idea will strike you when you're standing. Sometimes music will also help you. If I thought I could just sit still in a quiet place and get ideas, I would do that all the time, but sometimes nothing happens. There's no rhyme or reason to it. But you've got to write them down right away. I forget so many things. Then if I forget it and try to remember it, my whole day is ruined because I can't remember and I feel horrible. And I imagine that it was one of the all time great ideas. And it probably isn't."

"Sometimes some songs take years to get right. You do it and you just know it's not right and you can't get it right so you leave it. I think you can only do your best with it and sometimes your best isn't good enough. At which point you have to give it a rest. Because then you start doing really strange things to it. And when it starts going that far astray it's time to go away from it."

"An idea I was exposed to in art school: it's adamant that you enjoy the process more than the end product.  And that rule applies to all the arts, because we're fickle people."

"I took a stance [with my art] about a couple of things. I thought I'd earned the right; that I knew enough about Life at this point, and had gone through enough where I thought stating an opinion about a thing or two would not be soapboxy or preachy but was just hard-won experience trying to communicate to other people."

"Nicki Minaj, for example, has 77,000,000 Instagram followers consuming her free social content. 77,000,000 followers, and her last album sold 800,000 copies.  That means that barely 1% of her followers actually purchased an album. The rest? Streaming it, YouTubing it, just following without buying.  If a mega star like Nicki Minaj has a conversion rate that low for actual sales, what does that mean for indie creators?"

"Creating music comes from a place of complete subjectivity, and that's the way it should be.  It starts from a place of having to be so in touch with yourself, your emotions, your perspective.  And there's a satisfaction that comes out of creating, which I think is selfish, but not in a negative way.  What you then do with the influence you may gain from putting that into the world is where you can really contribute to something beyond yourself."

"When an audience is so massive, do people even know why I write or what it means?'

"Language and song are mingled in human history. To speak, to sing, is our heritage. Poets know that poems are songs, but few of us realize that novels are too." (musician)

"As I get older, and I get a view on the lyric a bit more, it becomes more meaningful to me."

"I see a lot of people who want the things that come along with being a musician or artist, but don't know what they actually want to represent.  When you don't have a vision for what you want to put out there, it can lead to being influenced by those around you.  Everyone is going to have an opinion and give you advice and tell you how to do things.  But if you really want to do your thing and be successful doing something that's unique to you, then you need to have a clear idea of what you want.  You will be influenced by others, but you should have the strongest sense of what you're putting out there."

"I've blocked a lot of self-published authors for this kind of behavior: you're not a sentient spam-bot. Quit with the auto-DMs. Don't sign people up for your bulk emails. Don't use social media to forcibly invite folks to some dubious online event based around your book. Your marketing efforts should be beautiful music that draws me nearer, not a hammer that clubs me where I stand."

"That's the case for most content creators. Film makers. Artists. Writers. Musicians. We've made it easier than ever to make stuff, and harder than ever to make enough money to live."

"We're basically abolishing the full time musician/writer/filmmaker. We're abolishing the full time creative. That's what's happening.  We're giving money to tech platforms to become 'Unicorns' off the backs of creatives, and driving creatives out of business."

"There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can't survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist's eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too."

"Making music and being an artist in any way, really, stems from an essentially self-centered place.  Some people will say that they make music or art to give something to the world, to share it with people, because they think people need to hear it.  I think most of that is bullshit.  You create things because they come from a place that is purely you.  It is very self-centered, which is not a bad thing—it is just the nature of creativity." 

"The biggest risk was initially sharing the music when I put my first song out.  When you put out something that's such a big part of you, it's emotionally exposing.  It was a huge personal and emotional risk.  It could have gone so many different ways, but, thankfully, it went the best way it could have."

"I don't think there's anything wrong with writing or creating with an audience in mind.  That's smart as long as you feel like you're part of that audience and you don't change or go against your own intuition an about what you should create in order to make them happy."

"The lyric should be able to stand alone before it gets married to music." (artist)

"With creative people ... there are always intrusions, hints or clues from ways of thinking that certainly appear foreign, and creative people use those hints and clues to construct an art, a musical composition or whatever. They sense a surge of power beneath."

"Playing shows has an immediacy that I'm not in control of ...  It took me a long time to enjoy that spontaneity and take chances.  It took me fucking up in front of a lot of people for a long time, and doing that enough times to realize that it doesn't matter: your intent is so much more important than the follow-through."

"People listen to music and interpret it in their own way, but it's weird when a thing that has helped you through a hard time becomes your career."

You wouldn't want to immediately start performing in Carnegie Hall before you've practiced your violin for 10 or 20 years.  Writing is no different.  It's hard—show me that you have respect for that."

"Later on I find out what [a lyric] was really about. Lots of times I'll think it's about one thing and as I get a little distance from it—and by distance I mean like, say, seven or eight years—it suddenly becomes very obvious to me it was about something else entirely. It happens especially onstage. Periodically I do something older and I suddenly realize 'God—listen to what this is about. I can't believe that I said this in public.'"

"Nothing is so destructive in a field of artistic effort as a stock term of abuse. Anyone could say of any short story, 'A mere anecdote' just as anyone can say 'Incoherent!' of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiously monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form is closely associated in my mind with that discouraging imputation."

"I have this saying: 'There's no music playing when your dreams are coming true.'  That is the hustle.  The hustle is humbling and, at best, completely authentic and gracious."

"Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know.  A variation of this is true for writers."

"There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can't survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist's eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too."

"Sing for the teacher who told you that you couldn't sing."

The View from the Cheap Seats

"Man, if you gotta ask, you'll never know." (in answer to being asked to define jazz)

Something—Everything—from a Scribble...

"The author T.S. Eliot was also a banker. Another writer, Kurt Vonnegut, sold cars. One of the greatest composers of our time, Philip Glass, didn’t earn a living from his calling making music until he was forty-two. Even as his work was premiering at the Met, he worked as a plumber and renewed his taxi license, just in case."

"I ran with that, the idea that the sentence should have some kind of acoustic value."

"When you go to the page you fuck up the music you hear in your head, and by fucking it up, you come to hear what that music sounds like.  Then you can begin to change."

"The rhyming, the singing made the reality of the poem.  It's not about something outside of the poem.  It's the poem itself, and it rivals the world.  It becomes the world, as real and substantial as the world we think we're living in."

Toast of London

The Mighty Boosh

Stronger Than Ever

Whiplash