Dizzee Rascal Quotes

The songs are not necessarily autobiographical. A lot of songs are a combination of influences. It might be some part of my life, or something I've felt, or something somebody's told me. It all comes together.

In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.

...With stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down.

It's always nice to be able to capture your life's experiences in a song and hold the emotion in that way.

I just love storytelling. I write music to tell stories. So when I'm done writing a song, I take it and go, 'Okay. How can I interpret these lyrics differently?' I love taking lyrics that were so close to me at a certain point in my life and then revamping them. I always want to take things to the next level.

Years of my life were lived knowing that I'd get a book out of them one day.

Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.

I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

I'm writing constantly about all my crazy experiences across the world, so I have a lot of music I've already written.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

You know, I'm trying to sometimes sit down and write some stories about my childhood and maybe one when I'm an old lady put them out like a book.

I'd say most of my songs I write from personal experience. When I feel like I don't have any inspiration in my personal life, I think about others that are close to me and maybe what they're going through or even just people I've come across, acquaintances.

As far as songwriting, my inspirations came from love, life and death, and viewing other people's situations.

I've always loved both writing and songwriting. The journey is fascinating to me.

I think, with music, I'm a lyricist who talks about real life things.

I have a huge note on my phone where things just start popping up. It doesn't make that much sense to me at the time, but once a song is finished, I can read into it and figure out who the characters are in my life.

I began seeing certain things happen in my life and other people's lives and getting inspired by it and writing about it. And that's where you get 'Happy Birthday' from and 'Ross Capicchioni' from or you even get 'I'm Sorry' from.

Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.

I have written my whole life. I remember writing as a small child.

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

Songwriting is different from music, although I don't deny now that it would be nice to have a little more background in music theory.

Everything was a song. Every conversation, every personal hurt, every observance of people in stress, happiness and love... if you could feel it, I could feel it. And I could write a song about it.