Sigrid Quotes

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

I've tried every which way for writing lyrics - everything from using really bizarre imagery and metaphors, sort of obscuring the facts of what I'm singing about, all the way over to a song like 'Losing My Mind,' where you're just reading my thoughts as they're occurring.

I really wanted to work hard on my lyrics.

In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.

A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.

You don't have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don't need any special equipment - that's the beauty of it.

With lyrics, being a poet gave me a different approach than other people.

The more songs I've written, the more I've grown interested in telling a story. When I first began, I had this list of opaque phrases where you can make of it what you want.

I'm actually a true lyricist.

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

A lot of the great songwriters in history have been collaborators, with a separate lyricist.

It's hard to write a song about reality because reality doesn't rhyme.

The classic, quote/unquote, craft of songwriting still works; it still is relevant.

One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

Lyricists play with words.

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

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.

To write a good song, an artist has to drawn from reality. There has to be some spark from realism that communicates a real feeling to someone else. You have to be real. Or you have to be a really good storyteller.

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.