Tom Lehrer Quotes
I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit.
Quotes to Explore
-
You can't try and make something you think someone else will like. You can only make what you like. How can you make a song that Yo-Landi Visser likes? You don't know me. You'll never understand me.
-
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.
-
Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
-
I love writing. Given a choice, after directing for all these years, and if given an army of talented directors, I would not direct at all.
-
Writing about a person whose struggle you wish you could solve is an act of compassion and also, frankly, opportunism.
-
There are no rules to writing a song.
-
I'm an intense guy. I run 10 miles a day, which helps alleviate my intensity. Also, singing helps defuse my intensity. Playing the piano helps, and writing helps.
-
I love teaching online at my website and soon I'll be writing a math book. I love to teach math. I just don't have time for a full-time teaching gig. Acting is way too time-consuming.
-
That's my favorite part about songwriting, the way you write a song, and someone else might hear it a different way.
-
Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.
-
The hardest thing about writing my second album is that I had 20 years to write my first album.
-
'Divergent' was my utopian world. I mean, that wasn't the plan. I never even set out to write dystopian fiction, that's just what I had when I was finished. At the beginning, I was just writing about a place I found interesting and a character with a compelling story, and as I began to build the world, I realized that it was my utopia.
-
Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.
-
I was once sitting on a tube, and someone was playing my song so loudly through their ear phones next to me. I just stayed silent and chuckled to myself.
-
The one thing that's terrible about traveling for fun is writing about it.
-
Lyrics can be important, but ultimately, what pulls people in on a song is melody and the tracks and the way music feels.
-
'E.T.' was the movie that made me want to make movies in the first place, and it was the first movie that made me focus on writing instead of what happens in the movie.
-
I don't see myself as an artist, as a writer. The sort of writing that I do, which is popular fiction, it's work. I have contracts to fulfil, and I have deadlines to meet.
-
Back in the days when American billboard advertising was in flower [said Hemingway], there were two slogans that I always rated above all others: the old Cremo Cigar ad that proclaimed, Spit Is a Horrid Word-but Worse on the end of Your Cigar, and Drink Schlitz in Brown Bottles and Avoid that Skunk Taste. You don't get creative writing like that any more.
-
It's a funny thing about writing. You get so balled up in a story idea that you lose your perspective and forget that human being might read your words someday.
-
I gave up tennis to study, but not before it had shown me how to focus and concentrate. It taught me self-discipline: I was playing four or five hours a day and doing five-mile runs. When I stopped, my energy had to be channelled into something else.
-
I want to get off with the screenwriting.
-
I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit.
