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
• Figures
• 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

• The only thing I'd ever wanted in my life was to be a major-league ballplayer, but I had to admit to myself that I wasn't good enough. It broke my heart.

  

  Earl Weaver
  • Life
  • Good
  • Heart

• Neither liberal nor conservative politicians can resist the temptation to stand as mighty sequoias of rectitude amid the lowly underbrush of fundraising.

  

  P. J. O'Rourke
  • Stand
  • Temptation
  • Liberal

• Kind souls, you wonder why, love you,When you, you wonder why, love none.We love, Fool, for the good we do,Not that which unto us is done!

  

  Coventry Patmore
  • Good
  • Done
  • Why

• The United States is prepared really to be engaged in the quest to get people in the world the dignities that they seek today, the social justice that they feel they're deprived of, and the common solution to global problems.

  

  Zbigniew Brzezinski
  • People
  • World
  • Today

• You're gonna get your traditional Busta Rhymes and Pharrell collabo. My man Focus from the Aftermath crew; Dr. Dre; the late, great J Dilla got work on the album. It's gonna be great - look forward to the new bang-out.

  

  Trevor George Smith Jr.
  • Work
  • Great
  • Focus

• 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