Barry Mann Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I don't really like to explain my songs.
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Many of the songs on Undertow were written at the time Opiate came out.
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Thanks to the Japanese and Geronimo, John Wayne became a millionaire.
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I really believed that my songs were good enough for the whole world to listen to. I had fans from America or the U.K. who would be like, 'Oh my God, I love your music'.
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So many songs are just a wink to the audience, but people take them seriously. 'My Humps?' C'mon!
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I love writing songs.
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I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.
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The biggest influence? I've had several at different times – but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.
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I tend to name albums after one of the songs.
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I went to the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU and wrote and directed a small amount of stuff there.
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From 1999 on - until 2003 - I covered publishing in a weekly column for Wired.com and wrote for several other publications - altogether writing over 150 articles.
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With my songs I tried to prove that there is love.
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I became conflicted in my late teens.
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A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.
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Every battalion has its marching songs.
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I don't have many easy songs.
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The songs I love to sing are story songs, from Yiddish songs to Tom Waits.
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A lot of my solo albums were produced by different people who had their idea of what songs I should do, and they had me doing a lot of ballads.
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In the songs I can still be really really direct but in interviews when I'm explaining my songs I shouldn't be so direct about who they're about.
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I've done lots of songs for film soundtracks and things like that-stuff I'm not ashamed of, but that doesn't represent my legacy with the Pretenders...I think domesticity certainly doesn't make it easy to write, you know, because you've got a lot of distractions and I think a writer is always looking for distractions.
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The best songs come unasked for. You don't have to think about them . . . Summer is good for songs. When it's real warm, if you have a sense of freedom, not a lot on your mind, and a feeling there's plenty of time, it just seems to be a good climate for music.
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The Washington establishment think Republicans win elections by you don't stand for anything, you keep your head down, you don't rock the boat. You know what? Every time we do that, we get clobbered in the polls.
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Knowledge is not just the preserve of the educated elite. Just because someone has not had a formal education, that does not mean he does not have wisdom and common sense.
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We became the songs we wrote.
