Richard Hell Quotes

Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has 12 syllables in a line, the challenge is, 'How can I interpret the meaning and contain it without going one syllable over?'

That's the great part about arts - someone taking your work and making it something else; it's becomes a true collaboration.

In some ways, it's more rewarding to hear someone interpret a piece of music that you're a part of.

Clarity is important. Part of what I'm trying to do with some of these pictures is eliminate as much of the potential, as many kind of readings as people might want to make, as possible.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

There is plenty of people I'd love to collaborate with, would love to produce with, would love to write songs with.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

People ask me this a lot, what a song's about.... I do think analyzing a song can be interesting, although it doesn't necessarily get to the point. It's a whole other side activity. I do like making a thing into pictures. If I get an abstract idea and all the words in it don't represent tangible things, I might try to take the idea and make it into a picture, create a little scene there, an image.

When you've written a song, sometimes it's really hard to wrap your brain around what somebody else is doing, or maybe the way that they see the song.

People should be free to take whatever they want from music and I think that over time I realized that different people always find different things in my songs, which is really good.

I think the best music videos are the ones that have nothing to do with the song. Those are all my favorites.

It's true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes, so that it's really left open for a lot of things, even though I remember a specific impression of something I had at the time. I can't say a song is about this or that; in fact, I wouldn't even want to. I just prefer to have people live it anyway they want. Because it's theirs after that. There's nothing I can do about it anymore

All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings.

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.

I went mainstream in a major way with the song "Let's Dance." And what I found I had done was put a box around myself. It was very hard for people to see me as anything other than the person in the suit who did "Let's Dance," and it was driving me mad - because it took all my passion for experimenting away.

I wanted to sing songs that my voice was comfortable with.

In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night . . . starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song. Sometimes we worked out in Venice, looking at the surf. We were together a lot and it was good times for all of us. Acid, sun, friends, the ocean, and poetry and music.

I regret that I've never actually managed to be inspired enough to get into anything else, and I should've been, I really should have been, because the piano can be a wonderful instrument. But I'm afraid that my inspiration is just purely on the words... and it's gonna stay there.

People want you to play the songs they know. I try not to reflect too much, and I don't really like to focus too much on myself.

The song is just the given. It's how you cover it that matters.

I hope we [with Patrick Leonard] can come up with something orchestral with some spoken material. And I also, God willing, hope that perhaps another record of songs also might emerge, but one never knows.

I really enjoy writing and producing for other artists. Some people save their best songs for their own albums. I'd rather give another artist one of my songs. At the end of the day, it still represents me.

When I was a kid my Dad never let me sing Patsy Cline songs for one simple reason: they've already been done.

Being a creative person. It's so much more rewarding when you find things on your own, to live whatever the writers are writing or to display what the director is looking for. You are the thing that everybody uses to get the story out.