Vangelis Quotes

It's true when they say songwriting is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. In truth, what happens is... songs comes through you.

From the time I could play the piano, I remember trying to write tunes. They were in my head, and I would just sit down and start noodling. Next thing I knew, I had written a melody.

I'm always pulling and really feeding off of my inspirations. I think most musicians do.

What's cool about making music is when you create a record, it comes from somewhere.

If you wanna write a song, ask a guitar

I think there’s no greater joy than completing a song out of thin air. It’s like inventing something, but it’s invisible, you know? It’s weird. It amazes me. You can send it out in the world, and that’s the joy. It’s like giving birth to all these songs and letting them go like they’re your kids.

I enjoy writing rhymes and sitting alone in a room listening to beats. It's pretty amazing.

For me, music comes naturally. I always just get in the studio and I feel like, wow, this is my heaven.

There is something wonderful about singing and writing music, I think there is something special about creativity and the ability humans have in that area.

For me, what I do is an artistic expression which is channeled through me. Fashion is just the medium.

I could write all songs all day long about what I think about the music industry or music in general. Sometimes I gotta be like, "Let's write about something else." You don't want to say the same thing over and over again. In a lot of ways, I look at records as a year or two of my life encapsulated in songs. They're almost like journal entries.

My favourite song is Someone To Love. That is more like me than the other stuff, as it was the only one I was actually able to create from the bottom up. I call it an homage, not a remake. It is an homage to Freddie Mercury, because I don't think people can really remake Freddie Mercury. That's why we did a gospel version.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

The true poem is the poet's mind.

In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

I wrote 90 percent of the record in prison. A lot of people wonder, "How the hell did you do that?" I just pretty much played drums on my legs with my hands and while I did that, I would hum the guitar parts and sing the melodies of the songs.

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

Listening to great music and art inspires me and recharges me.

I just want to try - on a daily basis keep trying - to make music that I really love.

The personal lives of painters are tragic and inevitable and do not explain the artist. For the artist is his work and no longer human.

Music was not invented by the composer, but found.

I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be; even I cannot tell, myself.

It was my 16th birthday-my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do-write songs and sing them to people. [...] Everything on this record is what I really wanted to say, and I'm back to being the poet I always thought I was.