Long live teachers of children, because they can show children how they can save the world.
Pete SeegerRead
Songwriters can’t explain. You get an idea and you don’t know where it’s come from. And if you’re lucky, you have a pencil or pen and can write it down.
Interpretation
Songwriters often create without understanding the source of their inspiration, relying on intuition to capture their ideas.
In this quote, Pete Seeger reflects on the mysterious nature of creativity in songwriting, emphasizing that inspiration can strike unexpectedly and may not always be easily explained. He suggests that the ability to write down these fleeting ideas, when they arise, is crucial for songwriters, as it captures the essence of their creative spark before it fades away.
In practice
A music teacher might use this quote to inspire students about the nature of creativity in songwriting during a class.
Long live teachers of children, because they can show children how they can save the world.
According to my definition of God, I'm not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes, I'm looking at God. Whenever I'm listening to something, I'm listening to God.
Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.
Well, normally I’m against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big.” — Pete Seeger (on how he felt about attending his big 90th birthday bash last year)
I’ve never sung anywhere without giving the people listening to me a chance to join in - as a kid, as a lefty, as a man touring the U.S.A. and the world, as an oldster. I guess it’s kind of a religion with me. Participation. That’s what’s going to save the human race.
I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically.
The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.
You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.
I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening...like a light in the midst of the darkness.
Film spectators are quiet vampires.
It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.
So it's joyful to me, in my 71st year, to be able to be in a play that is absolutely right for my age and my experience, and that is a popular success. What more could you ask as an actor?
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