Song quotes
10.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside song — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Three Songs 1 Mountain. I whip my quick horse and don't dismount and look back in wonder. The sky is three feet away. 2 Mountain. The sea collapses and the river boils. Innumerable horses race insanely into the peak of battle. 3 Mountain. Peaks pierce the green sky, unblunted. The sky would fall but for the columns of mountains."
"I'm always working on lots of songs at once. For me it's very emotionally driven."
"I find myself improvising a lot. But, sometimes I'll come us with a chorus or just one line and it will sort of hang out for a long time before it get's flushed out into a real living song."
"I think expression is at it's best when it comes from an honest place, so I always try to use my own life experiences, feelings, struggles, frustrations etc. as the catalyst for my song writing."
"Every artist usually has one or two songs that really define their careers."
"When a song comes from a real story and from a real place I think it comes across to people. That's important."
"I have an urban background, but I need melody, I need a song, so I try to mix and match and keep it fluid."
"The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties."
"Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs."
"It begins, as most things begin, with a song."
"It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway. And it was in the way they didn't coo, or caw, or trill, or song. They simply landed on the wire, and they watched him."
"Everything has to be intrinsic plot-wise in the same way, to use the Linda Williams analogy but to move it on a bit, as musicals - in old musicals, like in an old Cole Porter musical, you get the action, then they do a song, which reflects a moment - everything stops while that is being sung - and then you restart. These days in most musicals, the plot keeps moving through the song. I think it would be nice if someone constructed some pornography where the sex continues to propel you through the story."
"Hate was just a legend and war was never known. The people worked together and they lifted many stones."
"You were born to rock, you'll never be an opera star."
"Hard working people stopping for a drink on the way to work."
"Are you negative in a world that never stops turning on you?"
"There's two kinds of love, one is wrong and one is right."
"With a lot of songs on this record, one verse doesn't relate to the next verse. I don't think that one day really relates to the next day in life."
"I go in and sing the song and arrange it and mix it and that's it. It's no different than playing in clubs."
"I think [song 'Can't Stop Workin'] it's the constant work; performing and traveling. It gets to be a bit of a strain. But if you pace yourself, which I've managed to do, you can go pretty well."
