Samuel Beckett Quotes

I think every good song tells a story, as ambiguous and vague as it may be. And if you know what a song is talking about, it can only help your performance.

In nearly all ballads, the words set the mood and meaning, while the music intensifies or enhances them.

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

Music is only love looking for words.

I love the power of words - no music or special effects - and I want to demonstrate that power.

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

I'm a big fan of lyrics - lyrics are the thing that move me in certain ways.

Stories that can be told through language and words don't need to be filmed.

Words are music, really.

Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness.

The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.

I don't see poetry as something that has to do with too much emotion anyway. It has to do with language.

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They're the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

The dead keep their secrets, and in a while we shall be as wise as they - and as taciturn.

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

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

Lyricists play with words.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Words are so lovable. How could you not love words?

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.