Ben Harper Quotes

I am happy that I could collaborate with poets like O.N.V. Kurup and Yusufali Kechery in my career; they wrote meaningful lyrics, which made my songs last longer.

Lyricists play with words.

A lot of the great songwriters in history have been collaborators, with a separate lyricist.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

Nearly all men and women are poetical, to some extent, but very few can be called poets. There are great poets, small poets, and men and women who make verses. But all are not poets, nor even good versifiers. Poetasters are plentiful, but real poets are rare. Education can not make a poet, though it may polish and develop one.

Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.

In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.

Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem.

Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.

Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.

Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.

I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.

I don't deny," he said, "that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.

Yet half the beast is the great god Pan, To laugh, as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man. The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain-- For the reed that grows never more again As a reed with the reeds of the river.

Just now I've taen the fit o' rhyme / My barmie noddle's working prime.

Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.

While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.