Richard Thompson Quotes

If my songs are being listened to between any other songs, that is awesome, and I'm glad people are getting something out of them.

To me, using music is creating a shorthand with an audience. And I love music so much.

It's kind of strange to hear your songs sung back to you! You get a big insight into what people connect to, what's moving to people or what songs people are really into.

You may be sure that if you succeed in bringing your audience into the presence of something that affects them, they will not care by what road you brought them there; and they will never reproach you for having excited their emotions in spite of dramatic rules.

People make songs so that somebody else will hear them and want to do them. I guess it's an indication that the songs aren't so ultra-personal that they can't possibly be interpreted by anyone else.

The crowd is the crowd. You're gonna take them as an individual performer how you take them. The key is how do you learn from them. How do you use whatever is happening reaction-wise to get better.

To be honest, I'm always really interested when people say they can relate to our songs. On the first album, that wasn't something I'd ever anticipated or thought about.

If people can't relate to something, there's no use of the song being there.

The audience is so important. Because there's something that I might think is super funny, but if it's just not getting the feedback, I have to let it go.

It definitely feels different to perform to people who know your music. Because people's feedback is not just, 'Oh my God, that was amazing. Who are you?'

Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it - I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that.

It makes me feel great, knowing my songs are being heard and of service to people.

Filmmaking is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realize that it has this other muscle that could actually help. Do you know what I mean? People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once and a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanizes something else and that would be a really good thing to have happen in this case.

I don't ever see movies by myself. I always see them with other people because I want to know what works. I want to know where they laugh. I want to know where they don't laugh. I want to know what they think about it afterwards because in the end that's what the art that I'm working with is.

I really work hard to shape the song so that it's attractive... You don't want to give people the information in an enema.

A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.

The desire to please is maligned, unfairly. There are many sides to it. First of all, pictures have to arouse interest before people will even look at them, and then they have to show something that holds that interst - and naturally they have to be presentable, just as a song has to be sung well, otherwise people run away. One mustn't underrate this quality, and I have always been delighted when my pieces have also appealed to the museum guards, the laymen.

Songwriters write songs, but they really belong to the listener.

I'm just a man, not a hero. just a boy, who wants to sing this song.

I tell the songwriter's story. When I read people's lyrics, I'm so amazed. I want to tell this story and make it part of my life. I usually can't write lyrics down, but I can sure tell that story. You've got to make people feel the hurt and love in each song.

I've never watched my films with an everyday audience so it was really crazy to watch people clap at the end of my film - with no one there, no actors, no people from the film. It was just a spontaneous reaction, so I thought that was probably the best compliment you could get from an audience.

Anything that happens after I write a song...that's fine with me. It's up to the listener to read into it what they need from it. And that's part of the reason I write like I do, so I can leave the holes in the right places so people can say, 'Yeah, that happened to me,' and they're able to have their own little fantasy about it.

When you sit and watch the film with an audience, the focus groups and the cards and all of that is the less what you're worrying about. When you watch a film with an audience you see what is working and what's not working.

Often for me, if I hear a song I know, it clicks for me and I hear it in a different way and I think, "I could sing that song. I've got something to say about that song. Wanting to connect with an audience and wanting them to rethink songs; it is actually important to do songs they're familiar with. Also, I love those songs. In a way, I think I've changed people's perceptions of what a cabaret show like this could be.

To me, the stories that have always intrigued me are the stories of people leaving my movies and being affected by them. They walk home 20 blocks the wrong way. Or they lock themselves in their office. Or they find themselves weeping when in the shower after the film. And those intrigue me, because I know I've touched something inside them.