Quotes About Expression

You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses.

I would like to champion diverse forms like graphic novels and works told in verse and diverse writers and illustrators and diverse authors as well.

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

Poets these days, like artists and composers, have won for themselves almost unlimited freedom. You can pass yourself off as a painter without being able to draw, as a composer without being conscious of key relationships, and as a poet without making yourself familiar with traditional verse forms.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

I recorded harp first or singing first. I recorded it all together. Part of the reason is that I don't know how to play the songs without also singing. I forget how they progress. I don't think that any of them are verse, chorus, verse, and so on. They are not simple.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

I never edit the songs that come out. And they tend to come out as a whole. The closest thing I have ever done to editing them is just cutting out a verse, but never rewriting lyrics.

There are people who think it's easier to write books in verse, and it's definitely not.

The real challenge of writing songs isn't just writing a bunch of parts - like a verse, chorus, verse - but making something that flows together, that brings you back.

The blues is deceptively simple. Verse and chorus. Sometimes not even a chorus. Four bars that repeat, no Auto-Tune, electricity optional. It is the most direct, bare-bones of content. There is no interference between the head and heart.

I'm definitely trying to make songs that people can sing along to and remember. If you can recognize a chorus and leave with it in your head, it's usually a good sign. But then with the verses, I can get a little more free form. I don't really like to copy and paste things.

I just can't sit down and write three verses and a chorus and a bridge anymore. It just don't find it inspiring.

Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus' worth of lyrics, and so there's a real pleasure in accessing the intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn't qualify as 'great literature.'

I would do musicals in high school where there was dancing, and I would sing my verse, and then they would choreograph it so when I would take an eight-count to back up to the back of the stage while the other dancers covered me up because my body was totally... I was always in newborn-deer mode.

Sometimes I write from the end of the verse to the beginning of the verse.

You can always hear me breathing during my verses, but that breathing becomes part of the music.

At this point, in 2008, if you put out a book, a movie, or write a verse, paint a painting, it should have some sort of social value.

Loads of verses don't make it into the finished song.

You know for some strange reason I like to write the verse first. I mean I know the majority of people do the chorus first and when I think about it, I guess it does make more sense to do the chorus first, but I just like to write the verses first, I don't know why.

When you act, you're always playing a version of yourself. You can't bring more to the role than what you are.

I don't censor myself, but I don't want to force my sick-skewed version of the world, either.

I like to blur the line between remix and cover version and new song.

If you like looking at 'Starry Night' or water lilies or whatever, then why does it matter if it's an original? If the artist is still alive, and you want to support them, I get it. But if you want some famous dead guy's work, that's just a way for rich people to show off. It's the upper-class version of driving a giant Hummer.