A book needn’t be an author’s life work; a squib of novel insight with supporting evidence is sufficient. If you are going to have something be your life’s work, let it be a book of your life’s wisdom. Some people have 300 page books devoted to trivial topics and blog posts devoted to their life’s wisdom; that seems ironic to me.

Justin Wehr

We have to start the concert at 8:00 and we have to stop sometime because the halls are rented for a certain time but the music goes on in your mind before and after you play. It’s really just an agreement you make to stop at a certain time. On record, it goes for 40 minutes because an album has these dimensions. It’s just an agreement. But really the music goes on.

Interview with Kraftwerk. Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider talking with Synapse Magazine. September, 1976. On a side note, Ralf und Florian is a fantastic album.

I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it. Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they’ll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here’s a good subject. And it was.

Cormac McCarthy on The Road - WSJ.com

It’s the lyric that makes a song a hit, although the tune, of course, is what makes it last.

Irving Berlin. This applies to many things besides songwriting.