You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.
Billie HolidayRead
One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the sudden burst of creativity and inspiration that can lead to great artistic expression.
Billie Holiday's quote conveys the idea that inspiration can strike unexpectedly, resulting in a complete creative work coming together effortlessly. This moment of clarity, where everything aligns, is something many artists experience, suggesting that creativity often involves both hard work and serendipitous moments of insight.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about the creative process during an art workshop.
You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.
I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been.
A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.
Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain.
I joined Count Basie's band to make a little money and to see the world. For two years I didn't see anything but the inside of a Blue Goose bus, and I never got to send home a quarter.
Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose.
The best art is realized when you can share the experience of making of it and not just the presentation of it, so that the audience is part of the creation and not just part of the consumption. Then it becomes much more full-bodied and robust.
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
I've made movies that I thought were good. I've made movies that I thought were okay, but then I was very good. And sometimes you're in a movie and you think, I wish more people saw that - because you're good. And it just works out that the movie gets lost. But that's show business.
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
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