Paul Simon Quotes

I do gravitate towards the sad songs because I find them to be more of a challenge for me from a writing perspective. There are things about those songs that do touch people in a way that a fun song can't.

Simple things are always the most difficult.

My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.

When you first hear Mozart's music, your first impression is that it's very alive, but if you peel away the layers, you can hear sorrow and sadness behind it, and that's what I try to be: multi-layered.

It's almost required with major artists that there's some duality. And I've got duality everywhere.

In my opinion, that's one of the hardest things to do in songwriting: crafting a song that speaks to you but, at its core, is a simple concept.

Football is simple but very complicated.

Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to keep things simple.

There's a standard of songwriting that, when you start immersing yourself in those types of songs, it raises your own bar as a songwriter. There's also simplicity in the songwriting. It's much harder to be simple than it is to be complicated.

What is simple is false and what is not is useless.

The question was which spell did I make? Which did I have time to make? The answer was eerily simple. I had time to make all of them.

Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.

It's all very simple. But maybe because it's so simple, it's also hard.

A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.

I never feel the need to go out and make some grand statement that I'm dark and twisty and complicated, because I'm not that either. It's just not as simple as ponies and rainbows, though I do love ponies and rainbows.

Sometimes simple things are the most difficult things to achieve.

Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity's the real challenge.

Common sense is so very simple but very difficult to grasp.

Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication. -Aunt Beast

Intelligence is: (a) the most complex phenomenon in the Universe; or (b) a profoundly simple process. The answer, of course, is (c) both of the above. It's another one of those great dualities that make life interesting.

I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

[…] but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.

Simplicity is not so simple to attain.

There are no limitations with a song. To me a song is a little piece of art. It can be whatever you like it to be. You can write the simplest song, and that's lovely, or you can just write a song that is abstract art. ... A lot of my songs are very serious, I'm like dead serious about certain things and I feel that I'm writing about the world, through my own eyes. ... I have a love for simple basic song structure, although sometimes you'd never know it. ... Most of the songs I wrote at night. I would just wake in the middle of the night. That's when I found the space to write.

Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted.