Richard Rodgers Quotes

It reset and mended my freshly damaged and distorted view of life, and made me recognize that this thing we call music, this primal expression that we reshape and refine and define ourselves with, is the gift I was given. The ability to communicate what others feel but cannot fully express, the passing down and around of songs and stories, from Pete Townshend to Joey Ramone to me, to the audiences who take the time and effort to support our work and give us a way to support ourselves -- I'm thinking this is what I am supposed to be doing.

Where words fail, music speaks.

Yet, it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully - love, lust, longing; joy, rage, fear; triumph, yearning and confusion.

I don't know what makes a guy want to write songs and sing, but if you've got a message, you want to get it across. When I come up with an idea about the way I feel, I can really state it strongly in a song.

When I sing, I think mostly about the music. But I know that, through singing, my body shows everything that I am. I am a very passionate man and I suffer a lot and have a lot of joy also. In my opinion, it is very important for me to find this stimulus and motivation for singing.

Music for me is an emotional thing and it really does make me happy. It's not a tool for me to get fame or see my face in the papers or anything like that. It's about the fact that I really do enjoy it.

The whole beauty of music is that it goes where your words won't let you.

What passions cannot music raise or quell?

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It's always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

I got a song called 'All That I Got Is You.' I wrote that from the heart.

I definitely think the best songs are written when you feel something strongly.

Music is something that's so powerful and means so much to me.

Music was born of love. Had there never been any human affection, there never could have been uttered a strain of music.

I can't imagine my world without music. It's the universal language; what I make comes from my heart. What I listen to from others stirs it.

Today if something is not worth saying, people sing it.

What I do as a songwriter is a constant force in my life, that I'm grateful to have.

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

notes fly so much farther than words. There is no other way to reach the infinite.

The guitar is your first wings. It's assigned and designed to unfold your vision and imagination.

I think love resides in all of the songs, even when they are overtly sexual.

Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.

You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music. The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it's real. I don't think that you can fool anybody for too long in music. And you certainly can't fool everybody.

Poetry is fired by love.

I guess there's a song for absolutely everything that could possibly happen to a person.