When you write a song like ‚Forrest Gump,‘ the subject can’t be androgynous. It requires an unnecessary amount of effort.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

I think as long as I do a good job and put in all my effort to proving that I’m worth it, then everything should be fine.

Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman’s heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming from inside. There’s no tricks. It’s honesty with big melodies.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

Do your damnedest in an ostentatious manner all the time.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

In a sense I portray myself in a very androgynous way, and I love androgyny.

You have to put in many, many, many tiny efforts that nobody sees or appreciates before you achieve anything worthwhile.

I write songs about stuff that I can’t really get past personally – and then I write a song about it and I feel better.

With pop music, the format dictates the form to a big degree. Just think of the pop single. It has endured as a form even in the download age because bands conform to a strict format, and work, often very productively, within the parameters.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

I think that, whatever happens, I’m just happy I’ve written those songs and I’ve made an album. That’s really big for me, and I’m proud of that.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

Strangely, some songs you really don’t want to write.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

All the songs I write are about human dynamics, whether it’s with girlfriends, boyfriends, or family.

These are all personal crises, I’m sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It’s as simple as that.

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.

I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt – you know, I had to go out and do them.

Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

The people in my songs are all me.

I can write a song in about an hour if it’s a simple country song.

I grew up writing songs in my room on GarageBand, and I would make the beats just out of layering my vocals over and over again. Very Imogen Heap-inspired.

Most of my songs have names of people I’ve met or are dear to me. There are people who have privacy issues and about people knowing about their private life. But for me, I like to include few special names and few details about them to make the song very special to me.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

All of my songs are autobiographical.

I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn’t want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. ‚Discreet Music‘ was like that, and ‚Music for Airports.‘ What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

There is something about building up a comradeship – that I still believe is the greatest of all feats – and sharing in the dangers with your company of peers. It’s the intense effort, the giving of everything you’ve got. It’s really a very pleasant sensation.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

My production and songwriting and the environment around those vocals are not inspired by R&B at all.

I think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.

Every single one of the guys that I’ve written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans.

Writing a song is so personal. You have to have trust in someone you’re working with; otherwise, you’re not gonna come out with something that’s really you.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.