Robert Smith Quotes

I don't like to talk too much about my music; I like people to just experience it and not worry what I have to say.

I love how music can create an audiovisual experience. To me, some of the best music is the music that does that.

We cut songs that touch us because if they don't touch us first, there's no way in the world we're going to be able to sell those songs to somebody else.

If there's a song that stops meaning anything to me, then I'll quit playing it.

When your hair is rising, that's when you know it's a good song - that's happened to me with some artists and some songs, John Lennon songs or when Nina Simone sings. It's great to make those moments yourself.

The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.

Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

I like the music that I sing, cos I, like, feel it more.

Once I heard how deep music could touch people and what it can make you feel and all of these emotions it could bring out, I was really fascinated with it all.

Ultimately, you're looking for a soulful experience when you listen to any form music.

What I found was an emotional consistency with him. The words, the scenes, the situations - I wasn't mimicking what I thought Branch Rickey's emotional reality would have been.

I believe that the greatest music is storytelling anyway, in a heightened medium. So I write a lot of music, and I play a lot with my guitar, I still sing a lot, but now I'm more personal about it than public, in a way. I think there will be a time where I'd like to bring the singing back into some of my performances. It all depends if the material's right, if the story's right, if it's my kind of taste in music, as well. It means so much to me. We all know how affective music can be, I just want to make sure when I do it, I'm doing it because I actually feel it and I care about it.

When you find a song that you love, you just have to do it - why would I try to match it? When I wrote more of the songs in the '90s - 'Nick of Time' and other songs I was surprised I came up with - it was because nobody else was saying what I wanted to say.

Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.

I like how pure the expression is in music. You can go straight to the heart of an audience rather than through their brain.

I love Lauryn Hill, Tracy Chapman, Fiona Apple. People like that. People you can really connect to on the most basic human level.

Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Hearing the blues changed my life.

I still get a chill when I sing, 'You Don't Own Me.' I find some new feeling in it every time.

I want to reach the people. This music is the people's music. It's music for your brain, for your heart, for your soul. That is what we always go to achieve. Soul united.

How we absorb music is unique. I know what I do. When I'm listening to music, I tend to find myself in a song. That's what really makes you connect is if you feel what that song is saying.

People listen to music with cavemen ears: Is it a bird song or the call of a lion? The audience at a musical is dancing in their hearts.

I question what emotion Manilow touches. People are entertained by him. But are they emotionally moved? I don't believe anything that Barry Manilow sings.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.