Lyric Quotes
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One thing a lyricist must learn is not to fall in love with his own lines. Once you learn that, you can walk away from the lyric and look at it with a reasonable degree of objectivity.
Hal David
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Naming something, putting it on record, in a lyric, feels like affirming people. Ideally, that's what politicians should want to do: to put laws or policies in place that speak to people's experiences, to make them feel heard.
Jamila Woods
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I grew up the biggest fan of the Cure. Knew every lyric, had every album, B-side, single, poster, everything. Then cut to fifteen years later, and we're working on songs together. Ridiculous.
Mark Hoppus
Blink-182
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You know, when I did 'American Idol' the three times, I tried to tell these kids you have to tell the story of the lyric.
Barry Manilow
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In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.
Phil Harris
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I want to suggest a feeling. It's ridiculous to assume you can state an opinion. Somebody else can never relate to the lyric in the same way because their whole experience is different. You can only suggest, then people add their own history and experience to the lyrics.
Danielle Dax
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I won't get over that in a hurry: my least favourite atrophied Hazel McWitch lookalike in the world, singing 'I just want to make love to you', right there on primetime telly. She has to be the only person on Earth who can take a lyric like that and make it seem like a blood-curdling threat without changing any of the words.
Charlie Brooker
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Before I start, like to make sure I'm smart. Gather my composure, rather my swagger and my couture.Pivot my fitted, then begin to rivet, with a change of lyric. In other words, I reposition how I sit it. Then make you feel it, like I mispronounced 'filet.'
Wasalu Muhammad Jaco
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I'm lyric conscious. I like to tell stories, give advice. Instead of writing a 'Dear Abby' column, I do it on records.
Betty Wright
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My chutzpah was me singing to Mario Lanza. So Mario looked at me after I talk-sang 'Be My Love' for the first time; he took the lyric out of my hand as contemptuously as you can take a lyric out of someone's hand, and he sang 'Be My Love' back at me.
Sammy Cahn
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I'm not saying everybody has a social responsibility of what art they create, but art should be open-ended. I just feel there's a lack of consciousness and understanding of impact and reach. Just maybe, for a second, just think of the effect you could have with a lyric.
Mary Lambert
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When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back.
James Fenton
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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.
J. Tillman
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I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise.
Leo Kottke
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A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.
Lou Rawls
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When the student has her voice under complete control, it is safe to take up the lyric repertoire of Mendelssohn, Old English Songs, etc. How simple and charming they are!
Alma Gluck
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I like to separate the music- and lyric-writing processes if I can. I'll sort of noodle around on my keyboard and my computer until I have a beat or a chord progression, I'll record it as a loop, export it to iTunes, then walk around with the loop and sort of talk to myself in the loop, and that's how I get the lyrics.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
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Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
Marilyn Hacker