As a songwriter, if you can touch people and make them feel a little less alone in the world, then you've done your job.
Interpretation
Songwriters aim to connect with listeners and alleviate feelings of loneliness.
This quote emphasizes the power of songwriting and music as a means of emotional connection. Tom Cochrane suggests that a songwriter's primary role is to evoke feelings in their audience, particularly the sense of not being alone in their experiences, thereby fulfilling the essence of their craft.
In practice
Using this quote in a keynote speech about the impact of music in people's lives.
It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual. Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the colour which must be fought and vanquished by the other two.
Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.
I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tighrope dancer so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.
I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films.
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