Demetri Martin Quotes

I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

I've written some poetry, but...songs have to be more poetic, and I've really gotten to this non-poetic sort of writing.

I started to write songs. And I started to like what I was writing. I think it's a new way for me to express things that are closer to myself than when I play a role, because, of course, it's really not me. I'm finding a new way. I don't know what it's going to be. But I know that I will need to give it to people one day.

I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs.

I want to make great songs.

I don't talk about my personal life in great detail. I write about it in my songs, and I feel like you can share enough about your life in your music to let people know what you're going through.

Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.

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.

That's another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after.

I think the way Win Butler writes, I really identify with it. He writes very emotionally and very cinematically, and I just connect with his sensibility.

I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I've loved writing my whole life. When I put them together, it was probably in my early 20s where I put words to music for the first time.

It doesn't bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs - because at least they're looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

In some ways, the more that I write songs, the more I feel that telling a story is the most important thing; just being able to close your eyes when you hear some lyrics and go somewhere.

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

By the time I was ten or eleven, I had a song-book and I was writing everything down. It used to just be my hobby but now it's like my diary, it's where I can go in my own little bubble.

I was writing songs as a kid about leprechauns and Catwoman and teapots - whatever it is that little girls wanna sing about.

Not too many songwriters, when they write songs go for broke. When someone does who's really good, it's astonishing. There's a reason a three-minute song can devastate you, or make you get up and dance, stop what you're doing and go, 'What is that?' It just hits you. And it's a very potent thing you're playing around with.

If you wanna write a song, ask a guitar

I'm somebody who grew up listening to a lot of musical theater, so getting to finally write musical theater songs and songs that sound that way - the emphasis being on the storytelling, but the arrangements and the orchestrations can be really varied - I found that to be, actually, a really joyful discovery.

The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.

When I write songs I write for myself...I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.

I don't keep a journal anymore. I did when I was a teenager, but now because I write about it all in my songs, that's what I'm really doing.

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

Anything that happens after I write a song...that's fine with me. It's up to the listener to read into it what they need from it. And that's part of the reason I write like I do, so I can leave the holes in the right places so people can say, 'Yeah, that happened to me,' and they're able to have their own little fantasy about it.