Quotes About Inspiration

I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.

I always loved reading. Growing up, my favorite book was 'A Child's Garden of Verses,' by Robert Louis Stevenson.

In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.

I've always been a spontaneous singer. And all the stuff that you hear on the end of the songs, what they call the ad libs - that just comes out of my head. That's not thought out at all. I have the verses and the choruses, and then after that it's total improvisation.

I wouldn't say I'm a very controlling person. For instance, when I talk to the actors, I don't tell them exactly what I want because I want them to surprise me. I even encourage them to change some of the verses of the script if they need to.

We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.

The thing is, the way we write is all jams and bits and pieces that get pieced together and sometimes things are written with intentions of being a song, and then all of a sudden the main riff of this song, six months later turns into a verse or a chorus of another song.

I was learning 'Changes' at the time that my mom was sick and she was leaving me. And those last verses in that song, they really struck my soul, totally.

I have always used a great variety of verse forms, especially in my poetry for children. I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should, communicate to children.

It was the enchantment of spoken verse that led me to write for children.

To the poet, his travels, his adventures, his loves, his indignations are finally resolved in verse, and this, in the end becomes his permanent, indestructible life.

We play a beat for 15, 20 seconds and know if we want to get on it. When we record a verse, it's no more than 15, 20 minutes. We don't have a pen and paper. We bounce off each other.

The only band I was really over-into was Cream. And the only thing I really liked about them was their live stuff 'cause they played two verses, then go off and jam for 20 minutes, come back and do a chorus and end. And I love the live jam stuff, the improvisation.

It felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders the day I finally finished both verses for 'My Shot.'

As for my stuff, I'm just doing guest verses for other people's records. I try to stay recording, because if I don't, I get rusty.

I just write verses. I don't write all day long. When I have something that needs to be said, I just write it down on my notepad in my iPhone.

Sometimes I'll sing the same verse through the entire song, because the other verses aren't clicking. And when they do come to me, I'm in the middle of that same verse!

The turnaround is when you have a solo in betwixt the verses. You stoppin' to have a solo.

People think the chorus is the hard part in 'Take on Me,' but they're wrong. The hard part was making the verses bounce.

'Are 'Friends' Electric?' was two songs: the verse part and the talking part. Two different songs I couldn't finish. One day I was playing the main verse part of 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' and after a few minutes I got frustrated, as normal, then started to play the other song, and realized they went together.

In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.

If I do a song with a chorus and a verse, it takes me about 25 minutes. If I do a song with two verses or stretch out the song, it takes me about 30 to 35 minutes.

A song doesn't happen as a whole verse; it happens linearly, line by line, almost word by word, phrase by phrase. And if each phrase, each line, has a proper emotional feel and connects to the line before it and the line after it, the song will be doing what it should be doing.