Quotes About Music

I'd got into Cash after I'd used my pocket money to buy his 'Live at San Quentin' album, just because I liked the cover. It turned out I liked the record inside even more.

Listen to the melody and the feel of the singer, and try to get inside the character of the guy who's singing to find an answer to that or an accompaniment that is in that same pocket, that's not showing off or playing above the song, or trying to put too much into it. Try to serve the song.

Do not make the writer stand behind a podium. Anything but. A podium reeks of the lecture hall. A music stand, on the other hand, is nicely minimal and lends the writer - who usually needs all the help s/he can get - a musician's second-hand cool-factor.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music.

When a person listens to a good song, and they can look out at the world and their lives and see the dark and the light, the negative and the positive, all the different elements, all come together in one holistic poem, that is a very healing and very reductive thing, and that's what my music is about.

At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.

I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.

A really good poem is full of music.

You can say a lot more with a poem than you can with a song, but with a song you can really be more powerful with it. You can express it a lot more powerfully.

The question of sort of music and history, I think, are so important to understanding the poem as an idea but also us as people in the world.

The main thing a poem ought to be is musical. It should be rhythmic. You should hear it as a musical piece in your head as you're writing it.

They're very different things, a poem and a song, you wouldn't think they would be, but they are.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.

I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place.

I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception. So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given.

People called me Cilla when I was little because I was always singing and writing poems.

Everybody that read one of my poems went off and wrote poetry. They said that about the Velvets, didn't they? They didn't sell many records, but everybody that saw them formed a band.

I do not want to be bored listening to music that is muffled and known only to the poet himself.

For me, music is sort of my passion, more so than being an actor. I just never tried to make a career as a musician. It was just something that I did on my own time, just for me. I had written a lot of songs, but I don't really record a lot of music because, for me, it's the same way as a poet: I write to get things out. It's sort of cathartic.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.