Richard Thompson Quotes

When I make music and I'm talking on records, it's like I'm painting a picture. In my mind, I'm seeing a film.

There's a cinematic quality that happens in my mind when I hear something that really lands. An album is just a journal of a life moving through time.

I use colors to bring fine points of story and character.

When I was asked to compose a score for... 'Palo Alto,' I first thought to myself, 'What is the house that these characters would want to live in?' I wanted to paint a picture and color scheme that I could work around. I gently apply different daubs to see what fits to match the color I have in mind with these characters.

I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.

The ability to make somebody feel something: that's art. However you look at it, whether you're an author, a painter, a singer, a rapper, a spoken-word artist - art.

Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

You're just playing, playing, playing, and then an image or something will come into your mind, and basically you're just narrating it with music, letting it move along.

I like reading books with both hands, with my heart pumping, with blood on the page. So I'm interested in people who make stuff, and I'm interested in the lives that make the text. To read a book or watch a movie any other way, to me, personally, feels like a waste of time and misapplication of energy.

Even if I'm writing music, it's with a lyric in mind, to communicate some kind of feeling.

The music is in the lead here, and a large part of this, I have no idea what I'm doing. I feel a closer bond with the craft of songwriting, stronger than I ever have.

What I like most about directing is creating a world more so than anything. To me, the music is the wrapping paper on that world.

The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space.

I am a songwriter. I do get to put my personal experiences in song.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

I don't tend to cast roles in my head because I spend so much time with these characters and the drawings that they're complete in themselves, you know what I mean?

The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light.

I write most songs randomly. They don't always deal with something I've been through but something I think is important to tell.

If you listen to one of my albums, you can tell I do a lot of different things. In the case of 'Vincent', I thought of his picture 'Starry Night.' It was a beautiful road-map for a song. I used a lot of imagery from that painting.

It's great being an actor and being part of a play or a film where there's usually quite a big group of people who are collaborating, and your job is really to fit in and share that energy. With music, because I write the songs, it's a broader, more abstract process.

I like to have an album arc that comes from an experience rather than a story.

I find that albums generally tell a story. Because it's music, it doesn't have to be in chronological order.