Taylor Swift Quotes

When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do.

Good directors don't answer questions with their work. They generate debate and create discussion.

I enjoyed hearing people do their own songs. I became attracted to singer-songwriters. I became interested in them as people; was curious about what they wanted to say.

Songs are often character studies.

It's always interesting - how do you actually convey thought through song? We're used to the convention on stage. In film, we used to be used to it, and now sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. You need to be fresh and really look at the material.

My songs are self-explanatory... somebody pointed out to me that... my songs pretty much speak for themselves.

Film is the only language I speak, and I have been lucky to be involved in some great stories. You don't want to preach to people, but you want them to think about why things are the way they are, the history that is there as well as the possibilities.

If you actually dissect the lyrics in 'Motley Crue', you'll notice that there's a lot going on beneath the surface.

The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature.

I like those kinds of songs that have details that you remember and that have stories that mean something and that open up into different levels philosophically. I like those kinds of movies, and I like those kinds of books.

I'm interested in making films that make people think.

One quality of a good songwriter is to be vague. A vague notion, a vague image, but enough to give the listener the opportunity to make more out of what's being said than is there. That's the great thing about Bob Dylan's songs: We the listeners have made more out of them than he ever intended.

I feel like what Director Bong is so amazing at is taking so many things and presenting them to you - never telling you how to think, but, if you leave the theater thinking something, we've done our jobs right.

When a critic or journalist writes, 'It's too complex,' or, 'It's full of plot holes,' they very rarely take the step of identifying what they mean. The reason they do that is to protect themselves, because they don't want to reveal that they may have misunderstood or missed something.

Every single song I write has to feel like it has a beginning, middle, and end, like a movie or a short story.

You get to tell your story through your music if you choose to.

For me, it's all about making a song that communicates something to a big crowd, but you still feel like it's authentic to who you are. That's that kind of pop that I hope and wish to do.

Finally I started really opening up as a songwriter and an interpreter and taking songs from all kind of genres and stripping them down to just lyrics and the story inside the lyrics, and trying to make them really mine.

I don't think I ever wrote a song. I can write a lot of jokes, but when I try to write lyrics they're the most direct, non-figurative words, like, 'I like you, I like you,'... and that's it, for the whole song. People would go, 'Ooh, this guy's Dylan or something.' It gives me a lot more respect for songwriters, actually.

I'm not presumptuous enough to feel that people are going to feel what I have in mind, so I tell a story, you know, let them read something, that doesn't change, that as I have said it, you know, so that's the way I feel about the viewer, the viewer has a mind of their own and eyes of their own and they're going to see it their way, I just hope they look.

I see songwriting as having to do with experience, and the more you've experienced, the better it is. But it has to be tempered, and you just must let your imagination run.

Inviting audiences to open up and hear things differently is an important part of what I do. But I still love to sing songs with words, too.

A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

I'm somebody who grew up listening to a lot of musical theater, so getting to finally write musical theater songs and songs that sound that way - the emphasis being on the storytelling, but the arrangements and the orchestrations can be really varied - I found that to be, actually, a really joyful discovery.

When I write songs I write for myself...I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.