Quotes about lyrics

A collection of quotes on the topic of lyrics, likeness, song, music.

Quotes about lyrics

José Baroja photo

“As a poet I am an emotional accident; a lyrical tourist.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: Klairet Levy, R. Interview to José Baroja. http://letras.mysite.com/jbar050923.html

Billie Eilish photo
Dmitri Shostakovich photo

“What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in "serious" music.”

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) Russian composer and pianist

From an article in Sovetskoye Iskusstvo, November 5, 1934; translation from Laurel Fay Shostakovich: A Life (2000) p. 77.

Kurt Cobain photo
Andrew Biersack photo
Masiela Lusha photo

“Poetry is a lyrical insinuation. Often, its melodic subtlety kisses the subconscious mind.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

LaGuardia, Gina (October 2004). "Masiela's Musings". College Bound Teen (USA): p. 2.

The Notorious B.I.G. photo

“Lyrically I'm untouchable, uncrushable. Getting mad blunted in the S-500.”

The Notorious B.I.G. (1972–1997) American rapper

"Think BIG"
Song lyrics

George Santayana photo
Kurt Cobain photo
Kirk Hammett photo
Nam June Paik photo

“I want to shape the TV screen canvas
as precisely as Leonardo,
as freely as Picasso,
as colorfully as Renoir,
as profoundly as Mondrian,
as violently as Pollock
and as lyrically as Jasper Johns.”

Nam June Paik (1932–2006) American video art pioneer

Paik (1969) Versatile Color TV Synthesizer, Manifesto, cited in: Edith Decker-Phillips. Paik Video, Barrytown, Limited, 1998. p. 154
1960s

Viktor Tsoi photo

“There is not any kind of meaning in the lyrics, in fact it was an attempt at completely deconstructing reality.”

Viktor Tsoi (1962–1990) Soviet rock musician (1962-1990)

In an 1987 interview, "Aluminum Cucumbers" http://russiantumble.com/tag/viktortsoi/ (7 November 2012)

Jonathan Safran Foer photo
Carlos Ruiz Zafón photo
Jonathan Davis photo
Ram Narayan photo

“By and large the present day Indian film music lacks soulful melody, sublime spirit and compelling charm of its lyrical intensity and has nothing Hindustani in it.”

Ram Narayan (1927) classical sarangi player from India

[Sharma, S. D., Sarangi maestro calls present music soulless drudgery, The Tribune, 28 February 2008, http://www.webcitation.org/5pb5rvJkI]

Art Garfunkel photo
Kurt Cobain photo
Masiela Lusha photo

“While some mothers sing lullabies to their children, my mother read me poetry. And to this day, I associate my strongest and most insistent feelings with words lyrically organized on a page.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

On her creative inspiration http://tolucantimes.info/section/inside-this-issue/young-author-makes-her-mark-in-the-world-of-children’s-literature/

H.P. Lovecraft photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
John Lydon photo
Martha Graham photo
Robert Browning photo

“O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire”

Book I : The Ring and the Book <!-- line 1391 -->.
The Ring and the Book (1868-69)
Context: O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire, —
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang a kindred soul out to his face, —
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart—
When the first summons from the darkling earth
Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,
And bared them of the glory — to drop down,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die, —
This is the same voice: can thy soul know change?
Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!

Kate Bush photo

“I'm really very happy if people can connect at all to anything I do. I don't really mind if people mishear lyrics or misunderstand what the story is. I think that's what you have to let go of when you send it out in the world.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Source: As quoted in "Kate Bush Speaks" by Owen Myers in Fader (23 November 2016)
Context: I'm really very happy if people can connect at all to anything I do. I don't really mind if people mishear lyrics or misunderstand what the story is. I think that's what you have to let go of when you send it out in the world. I'm sure with a lot of paintings, people don't understand what the painter originally meant, and I don't really think that matters. I just think if you feel something, that's really the ideal goal. If that happens, then I'm really happy.

Tupac Shakur photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
David Klass photo
Michel Foucault photo

“Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Source: The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

Nicholas Sparks photo

“If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.”

Travis Parker, Chapter 13, p. 166
Variant: conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.
Source: 2000s, The Choice (2007)
Context: Finding a woman with a sense of humor had been the one piece of advice his father had given him when he'd first begun to get serious about dating, and he finally understood why his dad had considered it important. If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.

Jimi Hendrix photo

“You're beautiful just as you are, Lyric.”

Maya Banks (1964) Author

Sweet Possession

Scott Westerfeld photo
Gabrielle Zevin photo

“You're mine, Lyric.”

Maya Banks (1964) Author

Sweet Possession

Andy Warhol photo
Milan Kundera photo
Victor Hugo photo
David Levithan photo
Stephen Sondheim photo

“Consider some of the qualities of typical modernistic poetry: very interesting language, a great emphasis on connotation, "texture"; extreme intensity, forced emotion — violence; a good deal of obscurity; emphasis on sensation, perceptual nuances; emphasis on details, on the part rather than on the whole; experimental or novel qualities of some sort; a tendency toward external formlessness and internal disorganization — these are justified, generally, as the disorganization required to express a disorganized age, or, alternatively, as newly discovered and more complex types of organization; an extremely personal style — refine your singularities; lack of restraint — all tendencies are forced to their limits; there is a good deal of emphasis on the unconscious, dream structure, the thoroughly subjective; the poet's attitudes are usually anti-scientific, anti-common-sense, anti-public — he is, essentially, removed; poetry is primarily lyric, intensive — the few long poems are aggregations of lyric details; poems usually have, not a logical, but the more or less associational style of dramatic monologue; and so on and so on. This complex of qualities is essentially romantic; and the poetry that exhibits it represents the culminating point of romanticism.”

"A Note on Poetry," preface to The Rage for the Lost Penny: Five Young American Poets (New Directions, 1940) [p. 49]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Frederick Buechner photo
Chris Cornell photo
Mark Heard photo
Michel Foucault photo
Fred Astaire photo
Lupe Fiasco photo
Quentin Crisp photo
Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar photo

“Lyric poetry is a kind of poetry that's literally musical.”

Jan Zwicky (1955) Canadian philosopher

The Details interview with Jay Ruzesky (Winter 2008)

John Mayer photo

“It was so frightening at the time to be seventeen and have heart monitors hooked up to you. That was the moment the songwriter in me was born. I discovered a whole other side of me. I came home that night and started writing lyrics. I discovered it all at once: It was like opening up a lockbox, and inside was a depth that I didn't even know I had as a person, or a writer — incredible creativity and vision and neurosis, complete neurosis. They all go together in a package.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

On the effects of having a critical cardiac arrhythmia at age 17
Hiatt, Brian (2006-09-21), "My Big Mouth Strikes Again" http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/11515443/john_mayer_speaks_listen_to_his_hilarious_takes_on_paris_hilton_brad__angelina_living_in_ny. Rolling Stone. (1009): 66-70

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti photo
Van Morrison photo
Alfred North Whitehead photo
Walther von der Vogelweide photo

“He has no equal in medieval German lyric poetry and perhaps not even in European lyric poetry of the Middle Ages.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Ingeborg Glier, in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 184.
Praise

Brandon Boyd photo
John Maynard Keynes photo

“Logic, like lyrical poetry, is no employment for the middle-aged”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), F. P. Ramsey, p. 296
Originally published in The Economic Journal, March 1930. and The New Statesman and Nation, October 3, 1931

Navneet Aditya Waiba photo
Josh Groban photo
Chris Cornell photo
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti photo
Nathan Leone photo
Shreya Ghoshal photo
Burkard Schliessmann photo
Roger Waters photo
George Eliot photo
Waheeda Rehman photo
Koenraad Elst photo
Burkard Schliessmann photo

“The trends that produced Schumann’s early piano works started out not so much from Weber’s refined brilliance as from Schubert’s more intimate and deeply soul-searching idiom. His creative imagination took him well beyond the harmonic sequences known until his time. He looked at the fugues and canons of earlier composers and discovered in them a Romantic principle. In the interweaving of the voices, the essence of counterpoint found its parallel in the mysterious relationships between the human psyche and exterior phenomena, which Schumann felt impelled to express. Schubert’s broad melodic lyricism has often been contrasted with Schumann’s terse, often quickly repeated motifs, and by comparison Schumann is often erroneously seen as short-winded. Yet it is precisely with these short melodic formulae that he shone his searchlight into the previously unplumbed depths of the human psyche. With them, in a complex canonic web, he wove a dense tissue of sound capable of taking in and reflecting back all the poetical character present. His actual melodies rarely have an arioso form; his harmonic system combines subtle chromatic progressions, suspensions, a rapid alternation of minor and major, and point d’orgue. The shape of Schumann’s scores is characterized by contrapuntal lines, and can at first seem opaque or confused. His music is frequently marked by martial dotted rhythms or dance-like triple time signatures. He loves to veil accented beats of the bar by teasingly intertwining two simultaneous voices in independent motion. This highly inde-pendent instrumental style is perfectly attuned to his own particular compositional idiom. After a period in which the piano had indulged in sensuous beauty of sound and brilliant coloration, in Schumann it again became a tool for conveying poetic monologues in musical terms.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

George Steiner photo
Amit Chaudhuri photo
Chris Cornell photo
Chris Cornell photo
Dylan Moran photo

“Then this song came on—I will never forget it—it was called "The Funk Soul Brother." And I will always remember that because it was also all of the lyrics… and, er, it was that school of songwriting, you know, very easy on the words in case they get wasted, I don't know what— there's a shortage, and… it sounded like a million fire engines chasing ten million ambulances through a war zone and was played at a volume that made the empty chair beside me bleed. And it went, erm, "Funk soul brother… right about now… yeah… it's the, it's the funk soul brother… check it out. It's, er, well… it's the funk soul brother, essentially. He's, er, he's coming. He's coming at you. It's the… well… it's the funk soul brother." And after a while, I began to penetrate the meaning of this song, you know? I gathered that somebody was about to arrive, and everybody else was terribly excited—maybe he was bringing cake, or something, they didn't say—but the thing was, you see, he wasn't there yet. Ha ha, that was the hook! And I'm not saying it's a bad song, you know, or anything like that. All I'm saying is that if you get, I don't know, a broom, say, and dip it in some brake fluid, put the other end up my arse, stick me on a trampoline in a moving lift, and I would write a better song on the walls. That's all I'm saying.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On The Rockafeller Skank by Fatboy Slim
Monster (2004)

Benjamin Disraeli photo

“The Athanasian Creed is the most splendid ecclesiastical lyric ever poured forth by the genius of man.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Books, Coningsby (1844), Endymion (1880), Ch. 52.

Nigel Farage photo

“I am delighted at Des's support in these elections. And thank him for his rewrite of the lyrics of Send in the Clowns which we are planning to sing at our South East conference.”

Nigel Farage (1964) British politician and former commodity broker

In response to Des Lynam's recent support and vote on UKIP, during the May 2013 local elections - Des Lynam reveals he voted UKIP, 10 May 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/10049891/Des-Lynam-reveals-he-voted-Ukip.html
2013

Eminem photo
Giorgio de Chirico photo

“.. can you [contemporary painters] ever get close, even vaguely, to the solidity, the transparency, the lyric strength of colour, to the clarity, the mystery, the emotion of any of the paintings of Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Dürer, Holbein or of young Raphael? Friends, have you ever realized that with the oil colours used today this is absolutely impossible?... In the museums of Europe I have observed the work of the Flemish painters at length – those earlier, later as well as contemporary to the [brothers] Van Eycks – and I am convinced that the above mentioned brothers were not the discoverers of oil paint in its true sense, as is held today, but that what they did was introduce oil in emulsion with other substances, especially live and fossil resins, into so-called oil tempera emulsion, which was already known in the Flanders, to enable them through the use of veiling to give a greater finish, cleanliness and strength of colour to their painting.
'These oils which are their tempera' said Vasari, speaking of the Flemish [painters] in his Life of Antonello; and without doubt he was alluding to Flemish oil tempera emulsion, but it is sure, absolutely sure, that.... we are dealing with.... a tempera based mixture (egg, glue, resin, tempera etc) in which oil was only used as a means of unity and for the finish of the painting.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Chirico's text 'Pro tempera oratio', c. 1920; from 'PRO TEMPERA ORATIO' http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/475-480Metafisica5_6.pdf, p. 475
1920s and later

Andrei Codrescu photo
Herbert Read photo

“A short poem is often called a lyric, which originally meant a poem short enough to be set to music and sung for a moment's pleasure.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Form in Modern Poetry(1932)

Martin Rushent photo
Eminem photo

“You can be a permanent fixture in my lyrical mixture.”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Bagpipes from Baghdad".
2000s, Relapse (2009)

Josh Groban photo

“Per Te (lyrics by Josh Groban)”

Josh Groban (1981) American musician and actor

English translation:<bR>

Derren Brown photo
Richard Le Gallienne photo

“Dear Sister, You dream like mad, you love like tinder, you aspire like a star-struck moth - for what? That you may hive little lyrics, and sell to a publisher for thirty pieces of silver.”

Richard Le Gallienne (1866–1947) British writer

Opening Lines from Epistle Dedicatory, to his sister, Sissie Le Gallienne English Poems Copland & Day 1895 kindle ebook.

Colin Meloy photo
Francis Turner Palgrave photo
Roger Manganelli photo
Dorothy Parker photo

“The musical comedies of the month are She’s a Good Fellow and The Lady in Red, both of which owe their book and lyrics to Anne Caldwell—evidently a native of New York, judged by the casualness with which she rhymes “teacher” and “reach a.””

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 2: 1919, p. 82

Phil Ochs photo

“I write all my own songs and they are just simple melodies with a lot of lyrics. They usually have to do with current events and what is going on in the news. You can call them topical songs, songs about the news, and then developing into more philosophical songs later.”

Phil Ochs (1940–1976) American protest singer and songwriter

Testimony http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Chicago7/ochs.html at the Chicago Seven trial (11 December 1969)

Orson Welles photo

“Thank you, Donald, for that well-meant but rather pedestrian introduction. Regarding yourself, I quote from the third part of Shakespeare's Henry VI, Act Two, Scene One. Richard speaks, "Were thy heart as hard as steel/ As thou hast shown it flinty by thy deeds/ I come to pierce it, or to give thee mine." To translate into your own idiom, Donald; you're a yo-yo. Now I direct my remarks to Dean Martin, who is being honored here tonight… for reasons that completely elude me. No, I'm not being fair to Dean because - this is true - in his way Dean, and I know him very well, has the soul of a poet. I'm told that in his most famous song Dean authored a lyric which is so romantic, so touching that it will be enjoyed by generations of lovers until the end of time. Let's share it together. [Opens a songsheet for Dean's "That's Amore" and reads in a monotone] "When the moon hits your eye/ Like a big pizza-pie/ That's amore" Now, that's what I call 'touching', Dean. It has all the romanticism of a Ty-D-Bol commercial. "When the world seems to shine/ Like you've had too much wine/ That's amore" What a profound thought. It could be inscribed forever on a cocktail napkin. Hey, there's more. "Tippy-tippy-tay/ Like a gay tarantella" Like a gay tarantella? Apparently, Dean has a 'side Dean' we know nothing about. "When the stars make you drool/ Just like a pasta fazool…. Scuzza me, but you see/ Back in old Napoli/ That's amore" No, Dean; that's infermo, Italian for "sickened". Now, lyrics like that - lyrics like that ought to be issued with a warning: a song like that is hazardous to your health. Ladies and gentlemen… [motions to Dean] you are looking at the end result!”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Speech given at a Dean Martin Celebrity Roast. Viewable here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlKR0i-51S4.

James Stephens photo

“The duty of a lyrical poet is not to express or explain, it is to intensify life.”

James Stephens (1882–1950) Irish writer

Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1954) p. xii.

Russell Brand photo