The Saunterer

Keith Richards on why we write songs

    The Saunterer is sure Keith Richards has it wrong below if he is thinking of all song writers. For instance, we can’t see Cole Porter agreeing with him. But for what it’s worth, for Keith Richard’s kind of songs, he says:

    What is it that makes you write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us.

    (Quoted from page 277 of Life, by Keith Richards. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Keith Richards, click here. For images of or relating to Keith Richards, click here.

Yehudi Menuhin on why music is

    We have instinctive need for music. If music were not, its absence would compel us to invent it. Yehudi Menuhin:

    Music is our oldest form of communication, older than language or art; it begins with the voice, and with our overwhelming need to reach out to each other.

    (Quoted from page 130 of The Prehistory of Music, by Iain Morley. Oxford University Press, 2013.)
    For a brief biography of Yehudi Menuhin, click here. For images of or relating to Yehudi Menuhin, click here.
    For a brief biography of Iain Morley, click here. For images of or relating Iain Morley, click here.

Thornton Wilder’s advice to aspiring writers

    The main reason young writers fail is that they take up their pen before they have accumulated experience:

    As to the young people who are going into writing — I beg them to have no impatience to be published. I tell them that the notion of acquiring some reputation in order to impress parents and friends is one of the enemies of good writing.
    Do not aspire to earn your living by your pen — get some job to support you while you write at midnight, and take a job as little connected with writing as possible — teaching mathematics, I think, would be splendid. Having a gas station on the New Mexican desert would be wonderful.

    (Quoted from page 174 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Thornton Wilder, click here. For images of or relating to Thornton Wilder, click here.