Phil Harris 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 love the feeling of creating pictures in someone's mind just by spelling out the right lyrical combination.

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.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

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

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

Sure, you always put some of your own experience into a film.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

As a lyricist, you love to hear other great lyrics or other great concepts.

Writers to some extent are childish, and it's at the childish level that one really engages with any experience. What really moves you is at the very personal, childish level of the imagination. My business is the imagination, and my imagination is engaged by Asia.

I really wanted to work hard on my lyrics.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

I was a very romantic, overly dramatic young lady, which served me well as a songwriter. Especially as someone who had to focus on lyrics and melody, because if you're a dramatic and romantic person, lyrics come easy, and you turn every single short-term relationship into the biggest 'Romeo-and-Juliet' story ever.

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.

When I discovered metaphor and what it meant, I got really excited. That was what really pushed me through into music.

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.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.

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.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.