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

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• Song
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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

• A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.

  

  H. P. Lovecraft
  • Writing
  • Mind
  • Style

• Movements are not radical. Movements are the American way. A small group of abolitionists writing and speaking eventually led to the end of slavery. A few stirred-up women brought about women's voting. The Populist movement, the Progressive movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women's movement - the examples go on and on of 'little people' getting together and telling the truth about their lives. They made our government act.

  

  Unita Zelma Blackwell
  • Writing
  • War
  • Together

• I think all the songs at Moth are about different things, but if we were to speak about it as a whole, it's really about, it's about joy, and about sensuality and vulnerability and also fun, energy, living in New York in 2015, being out of control, wanting to be in control, failing! It's a sort of story of our lives.

  

  Caroline Polachek Chairlift
  • Different
  • Thinking
  • Fun

• Historical theology has too often failed to interpret repentance as a positive creative force. ... Essentially, if Christianity is to succeed in the next millennium, it must cease to be a negative religion and must become positive.

  

  Robert H. Schuller
  • Force
  • Theology
  • Failed

• Even when your dream that you set out comes true, it's not always perfect, and there isn't always the kiss at the end, and we all get to live happily ever after. That's not the reality of life.

  

  Emma Stone
  • Dream
  • Comes true
  • Reality Of Life

• 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