Jimmy Webb Quotes

I've always really enjoyed sounds and alliteration and funny words and funny melodies.

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

Lyricists play with words.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

You want to know how to rhyme, then learn how to add. It's mathematics.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

For Stevie, the words are of prime importance; the song moves around the words, rather than the words moving around the song.

I hear a little firecracker go off when you come up with a good rhyme.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

A really good poem is full of music.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

I like to play with words and the sounds of words - that's extremely important to me.

Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

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

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.

I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

I love playing with words and texture.

There's something so wonderful about writing in rhyme where it isn't just the meaning of the words, it's the music to the words and the shape and the sound.

Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.