Mike O'Brien Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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The more I go on in this career of making albums, writing songs and playing music, the more I think of each album as a movie. I really wanted to make a film, but making a film is much more expensive than making a record.
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Writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was a fun exercise in mixing just the right amount of the Bard with just the right amount of everyone's favorite galaxy far, far away.
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It takes me a long time writing books. It takes me about five years to write a book, and when I'm done, the last thing I want to do is to do it again.
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You get on the radio by writing your own songs. But we had the dilemma of not being able to play anywhere because we weren't able to play anything that anyone wanted to hear. So we learned songs that we thought that we could do without puking.
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I love writing songs.
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I like writing flawed women, and being one, it's something I feel I can write with some veracity and authority.
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I've been pretty lucky with neighbors. But back in 1998, I lived, like, literally next door to Wrigley Field in Chicago. And I had, like, 50,000 bad neighbors spread out over the course of one summer. I'm a diehard Cubs fan, but living right next to the ballpark, it's just - as you're trying to go to sleep, you can just, like, hear urination.
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There are no rules to writing a song.
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I was on the beach every summer. That was the pleasant part of my childhood because we were right by the sea. We'd take a picnic, and I'd spend hours in the water until I turned blue. You couldn't get me out of there.
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I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
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I spent a lot of time doing really unimportant work as an actor. It was important when I started writing that I obviously make it entertaining, or no one is going to go see it - but to really make you think, that is my goal.
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Whenever you're writing something that's reflective, you have to put yourself through some sort of ordeal just to understand the way you're feeling.
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Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.
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Storytelling is storytelling. Good stories need compelling characters and interesting conflicts. That's the bottom line no matter what medium you're writing for.
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On a very personal level, I have fond memories of spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress working on my collection of poems 'Native Guard.' I was there over a summer doing research in the archives and then writing in the reading room at the Jefferson building.
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I think when you're 17 and you're angry, you're angry about very short-term things. And there's nothing wrong about writing that record. It's a very real record to write; it's the realest record I could write when I was 17. The problem is, when you're 28, it's not the same thing; it can be a put-on.
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The one thing that's terrible about traveling for fun is writing about it.
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I'm always drawn to writing things that feel like uncharted territory.
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If I had a choice as to my perfect career, I would make a couple of films a year and then concentrate on natural history.
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A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.
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It is a mistake to think that one limits one’s risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence.
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Mentally, I'm not ever going to go away.
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Citizens who live or work near protest sites or marches have every right to be free of violence from protesters, and they should never be subjected to destruction of property.
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I enjoy, in the summer, getting back to writing in my own voice.
