I only get involved with projects as a producer if I feel creatively inspired.
My family is my biggest inspiration. My son, my husband, and my family inspire me to be better, do better, and live better.
I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.
The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.
I just wanted to have a look at my whole musical career, get right back to when I started and why I started doing it in the first place.
How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.
I have a notebook of concepts. There are titles everywhere if you are looking for them. I pull from them. There is a secret list that I keep for myself about what I want to sing about, and those are the ones I know I am not going to give up for someone else.
Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.
If I don't see a music video to it while writing it, I just scrap it immediately. It's very visual.
Whenever I view success, I'm dressed as Mozart on an island.
For me, always, the big inspiration really comes from talking with my creators, my showrunners and my producers, and seeing what is their vision for their project.
You don't know what inspires you. You like to think you know what inspires you, but in the final analysis I don't think you really do. It's great to look at a blank sheet of paper, you know, and walk up to an instrument and not know what's gonna happen. It's the most challenging thing I do.
Whenever I'm writing a script, I'm scoring myself by playing the right kind of music.
Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
For me, L.A. was, and is, a very creative place to be.
Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine.
I write characters that are based on elements of people I know and experiences I've really had.
It's really hard for me to finish a song unless I have a strong visual in my head while I'm writing it.
Creativity has a lot to do with the main idea. Inspiration is what comes when you are dealing with the idea. But inspiration won't invite what's not there to begin with.
Without Metallica, I wouldn't be doing what I am doing. I have every Metallica record, of course, and I would spend hours on drums in my parents' basement with the stereo behind me, cranking those records and learning Lars' drum beats, beat by beat.
I pick up inspiration from everywhere and it all manages to keep stored in my brain somewhere.
All good writing comes out of aloneness.
A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.
I would think, as an artist, it's inescapable that you'll be affected by the world around you.
Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it.
