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.

Tom Lehrer

• Writing
• Song
• Jobs
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• Quitting

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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.

  

  Yolandi Visser
  • Think
  • Song
  • Know

• 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.

  

  Wayne Kramer
  • Writing
  • Play
  • Thought

• 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.

  

  Patrick White
  • Life
  • Writing
  • 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.

  

  Vikram Rohit Shetty
  • Writing
  • Love
  • Army

• Writing about a person whose struggle you wish you could solve is an act of compassion and also, frankly, opportunism.

  

  Karen Bender
  • Writing
  • Wish
  • Struggle

• There are no rules to writing a song.

  

  Randy Castillo Mötley Crüe
  • Writing
  • Song
  • Rules

• 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.

  

  Dan Hill
  • Writing
  • Guy
  • Day

• Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.

  

  H. P. Lovecraft
  • Song
  • Journey
  • End

• When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in their heads with their characters. But when you zip over to read email or check your Facebook page, you get zapped out of the fictive dream. It's brutal on my writing.

  

  M. J. Rose
  • Up
  • Writing
  • Dream

• 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.

  

  Danica McKellar
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Love

• That's my favorite part about songwriting, the way you write a song, and someone else might hear it a different way.

  

  RaeLynn
  • Different
  • Song
  • You

• 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.

  

  C. S. Lewis
  • Writing
  • Strong
  • You

• The hardest thing about writing my second album is that I had 20 years to write my first album.

  

  Halsey
  • Writing
  • Years
  • First

• '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.

  

  Veronica Roth
  • World
  • Writing
  • Character

• Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

  

  Pat Conroy
  • Writing
  • Words
  • Imagination

• 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.

  

  Sam Smith
  • Song
  • Myself
  • Silent

• The one thing that's terrible about traveling for fun is writing about it.

  

  P. J. O'Rourke
  • Writing
  • Fun
  • Terrible

• Lyrics can be important, but ultimately, what pulls people in on a song is melody and the tracks and the way music feels.

  

  Babyface
  • People
  • Music
  • Important

• After I finished my first draft of 'Salvage the Bones,' I felt that I wasn't political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about.

  

  Jesmyn Ward
  • Writing
  • Political
  • Community

• It's very rare that people are exactly who they appear to be. Venice has a lot of that too, but the face of it is quite beautiful, interesting, and textured.

  

  William Emerson Arnett
  • People
  • Beautiful
  • Interesting

• That's all I think about these days. Must be because I have so much time to kill every day. When you don't have anything to do, your thoughts get really, really far out - so far out you can't follow them all the way to the end.

  

  Haruki Murakami
  • Way
  • Thoughts
  • Follow

• My uncle was skipper on the old Claymore sailing out from Oban to the Inner Hebrides. My father worked for MacBraynes all his life, on freight boats and then on ferries crossing to Skye, Barra, Uist, the small isles and Iona.

  

  Johann Lamont
  • Life
  • Father
  • Small

• Surfing and trail running chill me out. I like reading, too. And playing my guitar - I wish I were better.

  

  Alex O'Loughlin
  • Running
  • Reading
  • Wish

• 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.

  

  Tom Lehrer
  • Writing
  • Song
  • Jobs