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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"Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people."
"There's nothing like the eureka moment of knocking off a song that didn't exist before - I won't compare it to sex, but it lasts longer."
"It's a powerful thing hearing your friend on a very beautiful song."
"By the time I was 12 or 13, I felt that I was special, because I could play the guitar and write songs."
"Sing, seraph with the glory! heaven is high. Sing, poet with the sorrow! earth is low. The universe's inward voices cry "Amen" to either song of joy and woe. Sing, seraph, poet! sing on equally!"
"Gonna travel, gonna travel wild and free I'm gonna pack my bags because this great big world is calling me"
"My songs can make you cry, take you by surprise at the same time, can make you dry your eyes with the same rhyme"
"For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled, even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten: The open road still softly calls like a nearly forgotten song of childhood."
"As long as the songs are strong, I think you can express yourself in any style and have it be soulful and have it be your own voice."
"There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book."
"Someone recently played me 'Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell' by Das Racist. That should be my theme song."
"You're creating an intimacy that everybody feels, that it's their experience, not yours. I'll never introduce a song and say, now this song is about 'my' broken heart."
"Breaking up monotony is key to life and it doesn't matter whether I'm stacking shelves or writing songs, if I was doing the same thing every day I just couldn't take it."
"People sometimes ask me if I would not give anything to be white, I answer, in the words of the song, most emphatically, 'No.' How do I know what I might be if I were a white man? I might be a sand-hog, burrowing away and losing my health for $8 a day. I might be a street-car conductor at $12 or $15 a week. There is many a white man less fortunate and less well equipped than I am. In fact, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient - in America."
"The 'Billionaire' song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It's funny."
"The people in my songs are all me."
"The song was there before me, before I came along. I just sorta came down and just sorta took it down with a pencil, but it was there before I came around."
"Folk songs are evasive-the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that's exactly the way we want it to be. We wouldn't be comfortable with it any other way. A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who's playing and who's listening."
"I want to use songs that everybody knows or thinks they know. I want to show them a different side of it and open up that world in a more unique way. You have to believe what the words are saying and the words are as important as the melody. Unless you believe the song and have lived it, there's little sense in performing it. I never wanted to be a singer that"
"A song is anything that can walk by itself."
