Sean Penn Quotes

Before I started writing my album, I didn't tell people many things. But because I'm going to the studio every day and telling strangers my deepest and darkest emotions, it's made me more of an open book. I wear my heart on my sleeve a lot more now than I did.

I always know when a song is good or close to finished. When I sing it, it makes me feel the emotion. My tears will start flowing or I'll start laughing. I'll start feeling whatever intensity or emotion was the seed of that song.

It is a great privilege to be able to work with, and I suppose work off, my feelings through sculpture.

During those times like in my early years as a writer I could actually write a song in ten minutes because all of a sudden a song is writing itself, I'm just putting down words. It just seem each line that you put down flows with the other ones. It's like writing a love letter you don't think about it, it's something from the heart.

I try not to write songs. I would rather emote them, and I found myself going back to my room every night while on my trip, just pouring out new songs and new stories about what I was seeing, what I was feeling.

I think that the song, the song "Stand By Me" is one of those songs that... and someone asked me, what was you thinking about or what was you feeling about? It's something that, songwriters just write songs. It's like an artist that paints. They paint what they feel. It's not, it's not about how many of these painting I'll sell it's just how they feel at the moment. And that's how I wrote "Stand By Me".

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

You never forget where you were when you write a song; it's a very proper memory, so I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing for each track. It was like going into a time machine.

I love the freedom of writing and then I love the realization of directing. I can't favor one or the other. I enjoy both parts of the process.

A lot of time when I'm creating songs, they're in real time. When I'm writing the song, I feel what I'm feeling for its full potential. As soon as the song is over, I'm like, I created art.

I find that I end up liking songs if I really have an idea of something I wat to write about-some problem in my life or something I want to work through; if I don't have something like that at the root of the song, then I think I end up not caring about it as much. I gravitate towards some kind of concept or idea or situation that I want to write about. Very often I have to write, rewrite and come at it from an opposite angle...and I end up writing the opposite song that I thought I was going to write.

I may be writing well, I may be writing poorly, but I enjoy the act of writing and sometimes when it turns out okay, I feel an elation that is incomparable.

I've always had a great love of music since childhood. It changes every day.. every time you write, it's a new experience. It's a self expression.

Sometimes I write music, sometimes I don't. I think I'm just writing more what's close to my heart, and musical stuff is close to my heart, and it's fun to write, and when something's fun to write you don't think about what statement you're trying to make or what genre you're trying to hone in on.

I always write the lyrics first. There are one or two exceptions over the years, but that's pretty much the way it's been. The process of applying music to words is a bit like scoring a film. You've got imagery.

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

You write your first draft with your heart and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.

We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that - the art of it - is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively; we internalize it, like birds do. And it’s a joy to sing, like the birds do.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

Everything was a song. Every conversation, every personal hurt, every observance of people in stress, happiness and love... if you could feel it, I could feel it. And I could write a song about it.

Rap helps me connect emotionally.

I had a lot of songs and words and scenes stuck inside of me. So Jacknife encouraged me to bring them all out. So, in essence, 'You and Others' is my diary.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

When I write, I don't have any expectation of what kind of song it will become or who it might reach.

Normally I begin writing a song with just with aim to express something, and sometimes I don't know what I want to express until a sentence comes to my head that will sum up everything about how I'm feeling at the time.