C. S. Lewis Quotes

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

If you're singing, you're telling a story. So to tell it and tell it right, that's it.

Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination.

Why then we should drop into poetry.

I close my eyes when I sing so I can feel the song better.

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Music expresses longing and love and joy better than any piece of dialogue you can ever write.

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.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.

Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.

As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe - we are happiest when we are creating.

I've always wanted to be a songwriter and a storyteller and somebody who conveys a feeling to the listener or the viewer.

Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.

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.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

I try not to think too much about where my voice comes from. I'm channeling characters and emotion to come up with beautiful words that tell a story.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.

Most of all, I like to sing my heart out to lyrics that really speak to people.

There's a kind of passionate expression in all my pieces. It's just that the nature of the expression takes different forms.

By heaven, I do love: and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be mekancholy.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.