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 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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Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it-whole-heartedly-and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. sic
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In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious. … The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person's skin had burned off.
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I started writing rather late in the game. I was fascinated about the story about how Bob Dylan, for 'Nashville Skyline,' wrote between takes. So I'd try to sing new songs off the top of my head. I had rather less than spectacular success on that. But a lot of my songs were done that way.
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Our happiness is certainly mixed in with the tragedies of life. You have to find the lemonade. You have to find the silver lining in the middle of everything that happens in life.
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Usually, I don't feel comfortable with a character until I've played him before an audience for several performances. It is not until after three months of performing that I learn to discover what I call 'all the nooks and crannies' of the person.
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I enjoy, in the summer, getting back to writing in my own voice.
