Claire Patricia Grogan (Clare Grogan) Quotes
When it comes to writing songs, I've always got to be commissioned to do it. I won't write unless someone has got a real genuine purpose for it.
Quotes to Explore
-
Tori Amos had a major influence on how I craft words in a song.
-
When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
-
There was a film called 'FM,' and we were asked to do the title song. And I said, 'Does it have to have any specific words?' And they said, 'No, it just has to be about FM radio.' It took a day or two to write.
-
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.
-
Being listened to and being heard is an experience that doesn't happen terribly often. To listen compassionately or nonjudgmentally to another person - not to get too heavy about it - but I once heard somebody say that was a form of real prayer.
-
I think you have to learn for yourself how to write. I'm slightly mystified by creative writing courses - God love them - because I can't understand how you can explain a process that I find so baffling.
-
What we call real estate - the solid ground to build a house on - is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.
-
When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways - either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength. Thanks to the teachings of Buddha, I have been able to take this second way.
-
I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.
-
The simple truth of our finiteness is that we could, by whatever means, go on interminably only at the price of either losing the past and, therewith, our identity, or living only in the past and therefore without a real present. We cannot seriously wish either and thus not a physical enduring at that price.
-
I like finding that common point between another song and my music. It's like between people; you can be of religion or another, from this country or from another country, but we're all basically the same. It's just the same with songs.
-
I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.
-
There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
-
I try to tell a story musically in a song.
-
To write a love song that might be able to make it on the radio, that is something that is terrifying to me. But I can definitely write a song about that chair over there. That I can do, but to sit and write a pop song out of the clear blue sky, that is very difficult and I admire the people that can do it.
-
But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere.
-
Honestly, are we ever going to get over 'California Girls' by Katy Perry? I know it's old, but that song - I love that song!
-
The real names of our people were destroyed during slavery. The last name of my forefathers was taken from them when they were brought to America and made slaves, and then the name of the slave master was given, which we refuse, we reject that name today and refuse it. I never acknowledge it whatsoever.
-
People are much more complicated in real life, but my characters are as subtle and nuanced as I can make them. But if you say my characters are too black and white, you've missed the point. Villains are meant to be black-hearted in popular novels. If you say I have a grey-hearted villain, then I've failed.
-
Men and women are different. I don't think men grow a brain until 26 or even 30. Girls mature a lot quicker.
-
I'm a New Yorker, originally. I was raised in Jackson Heights. I went to P.S. 148 and then Newtown High School. If World War II didn't come, I'd still be there in school. World War II saved me.
-
Verjuice may not be the easiest thing in the world to find, but you should be able to track some down in good delis and online.
-
When it comes to writing songs, I've always got to be commissioned to do it. I won't write unless someone has got a real genuine purpose for it.
