a hundred floors above me

Paul McCartney Discusses his Songwriting Technique

You are tempted to fill your life up with other noise instead. I see other people do it with all these incredibly important things they have to do all the time. It’s very easy to exist in this perpetual state of activity and then you’ll never be nudged in the direction you need to be nudged in if you’re trying to write.

Songwriting is it’s own point

I love writing stuff that isn’t any good; it’s an important part of writing

Letter to a young artist

Comic Idea

The thing is that before I can discard the verse, I have to write it. Even if it's bad -- those two happen to be good, I'm presenting the best of my discarded work -- but even the bad ones took as long to write as the good ones. As someone once observed, it's just as hard to write a bad novel as a good novel. It's just as hard to write a bad verse as a good verse. I can't discard a verse before it is written because it is the writing of the verse that produces whatever delights or interests or facets that are going to catch the light. The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.

[You do have whole notebooks of songs?] Whole notebooks. I'm very happy to be able to speak this way to fellow craftsmen. Some people may find it encouraging to see how slow and dismal and painstaking is the process.

Brian Wilson:

Every piece of crap you push out gets you a little closer to the gold bricks you want.