Music Quotes

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

~ Jordin Sparks

I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords. That was my original mission.

~ Patti Smith

My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.

~ George Steiner

Many great works of art, poetry, and music are inspired by astral memories. The desire to do noble, beautiful things here on Earth is also often a carryover of astral experiences between a person's earth lives.

~ Paramahansa Yogananda

I owe my discovery of the Hot Club of Cowtown to Kinky Friedman, leader of the Texas Jewboys. When I saw that Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were headlining the 2003 Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival, I thought it my duty to check out the band that had inspired the Texas Jewboys.

~ Clive Sinclair

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

~ Ezra Pound

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

~ Russell Simmons

I like to borrow forms and quotes and use a lot of allusions, in both poetry and music.

~ Jamila Woods

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

~ Maya Angelou

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

~ Steven Pinker

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

~ Alain De Botton

Whether you like modern incarnations of what country radio hits are, or you like what I'm doing, or you like something really off in folk, poetry Americana land, it's all just music, man. If you like one of them, great - go buy it.

~ Chris Stapleton

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

~ John Burnside

All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.

~ Flea

I can't understand Urdu, Bahasa or Russian, but when the Pakistani Faiz, the Indonesian Rendra and the Russian Rosdentvensky declaim, I can feel the living throb of rhythm and music, the warmth and passion of their poetry, as do the hundreds, not a mere roomful, of poetry lovers in the audience.

~ F. Sionil José

You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.

~ Fred Durst

Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.

~ Margo Jefferson

'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat.

~ Claire Tomalin

Country music especially can get very formulaic - you know, you have to have your verses and a bridge and a chorus, and a lot of the songs are written as just plain and simple poetry on the road.

~ Sturgill Simpson

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

~ Denis Diderot

A song is a short composition for voice and instruments. It is a piece of sung poetry set to music. It is usually only a few minutes long.

~ Russell Smith

I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I've loved writing my whole life. When I put them together, it was probably in my early 20s where I put words to music for the first time.

~ Lisa Marie Presley

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.

~ Alice Mcdermott

I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.

~ Janet Fitch

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

~ Rita Dove

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

~ Colm Tóibín

I really liked 'Blk Girl Art.' It's like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it's poetry or music.

~ Jamila Woods

Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.

~ James Fenton

I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.

~ Tamsin Greig

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

~ Mary Karr

The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.

~ Louis Macneice

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.

~ Dennis Gabor

I originally wanted to embrace the imagery and forthrightness of rap music. There are some interesting, dynamic voices in rap. But I find most of it irresponsible in its overt violence and commercialization of anger. As artists, we believe we can will action through language. If that's the case, we have to take responsibility for what we say.

~ Yusef Komunyakaa

What influenced me was Tori Amos, who was unapologetic about expressing anger through music, and Sinead O'Connor. Those two in particular were really moving for me, and very inspiring, before I wrote 'Jagged Little Pill.'

~ Alanis Morissette

I turned to music originally because of my past and needing a release or an outlet to get out anger or frustration or hurt.

~ Christina Aguilera

I was being very bad because I didn't know how to express myself. Music gave me an outlet to express myself and channel that anger.

~ Tory Lanez

The Clash had a unique, special relationship with Scotland. Perhaps it was something to do with the energy, anger and beauty in their music. In Scotland at that time, there was a lot of to be angry about. And a great need of some energy and beauty.

~ John Niven

I've been trying to learn how to not be so conflicted about things like my own anger. I've always had a place in my music for my anger as a way of compensating for not having a mechanism to express it in my everyday life. So I've been trying to be more true to myself, and that helps me to chill out a little bit. But politically, uh-uh. No.

~ Ani Difranco

I use the music to vent, and a lot of the stuff that I am writing about or was writing about contained a lot of anger and anxiety, stress and depression, so that's how the album came out so dark.

~ Vanilla Ice

I wasn't a very academic kid, and music was the way for all that feeling and angst and sex and love and anger to be channelled.

~ Dave Davies