Jon Pardi Quotes

You can't ask me to explain the lyrics because I won't do it.

I don't even know if I always entirely get what I'm trying to say right away with lyrics. I like a lot of things that are more subtext. I grew up mishearing lyrics my whole life, but somehow there's so much more, too, that's implied in vocal delivery and the music itself and the gestural quality of it.

When people ask what 'American Pie' is about, they're missing the point. The song isn't about the lines themselves - it's about what is between the lines. The song is about what isn't there.

I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about.

A lot of the lyrics I write involve images that just swing the song in a way that feels really good to me and there isn't a literal explanation. They're not riddles for the listener to solve.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

The lyrics are what I work on the hardest, but I'm not trying to make a perfectly clear message or anything like that. In fact, I'm usually trying to avoid saying something too directly, because usually that rings false anyway.

All good art, to me, is uncertainty.

I do think my lyrics have gotten... not necessarily more poetic, but more open to interpretation; they're less literal.

In our hands, even the straightest lyric sounded shady.

It's funny: sometimes with 'Spaced,' people would try and read too much into something I'd done, with the references meaning something more than they do.

'Simply the Best' has always been one of my favourite songs and a song that I've always thought was far deeper than what you imagine it to be at first listen. I found the lyrics to be really, oddly beautiful, considering you rarely stop and think about them.

A lot of my paintings have quite negative meanings, but painted in a bright and cheerful way.

I think the films that work the best are the ones that seem to be about one thing but then, under the surface, bubbling away, are lots more important questions that you're not really aware of, and when you leave the cinema, your mind is ablaze with different thoughts!

My writing is not just all facts and voices. I strive to create a text that works as a sign, pointing out undercurrents that lie beneath the facts.

I am always surprised at all the things people read into my photos, but it also amuse me. That may be because I have nothing specific in mind when I'm working. My intentions are neither feminist nor political. I try to put double or multiple meanings into my photos, which might give rise to a greater variety of interpretations.

All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.

Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

I've always worked to find really deep meaning of song and also at the same time having it covered in sugar, so it can be taken two or three different ways.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.