Gregory Porter Quotes

I've always wanted to sing. I don't think I have a great voice, but I just think that I get the emotion. It's very authentic. Whatever emotion I'm feeling, I can sing it, and you can feel it.

A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.

I've always written about things that cause me to feel something.

My advice would be to write what is most personal and specific to your experience or your life. And your voice will emerge and because of its specificity, it will be universal.

I always write from a personal place - whether it be about my friends or myself or a story that I heard.

I have always written from a personal place.

I feel like one of my strengths is writing about stories that are unique to me but somehow relate with everyone, and the one thing I've found is that if you make a song wholly unique to you, then you don't have to compete with everybody, because nobody else can make a song like you.

I wish someone had told me that my stories are really mine to tell. In other words, anything that I think is important or that has moved me has the ability to move somebody else.

My singing - it's who I am, it's all of me and it's my soul. The self expression of using your vocal equipment is not only physical and spiritual, but it's something you can't explain. It's your heart and soul together. Yes, I enjoy acting, but I portray other people. But when I sing, it's just me on that stage, communicating how I feel, how I think and what I believe.

I think I'm attracted to writers who tell us something about ourselves.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

I didn't write the book to sell the book, but to tell my experiences.

I feel like I have some stuff that matches 'Fight Song,' not in necessarily the message exactly but in the emotion and honesty.

I think no one but me has the right to write about my life as I want to write it in a particular way. I don't think any other person will be able to tell the story of my life like how I have approached it. It works best when it's written by someone who has experienced it herself.

In today's time, writing stuff that actually happened is touch-and-go, because you don't want to be too personal. If you are, then it probably won't relate to a mass audience. A lot of times you have to make it sound like it's about everybody else, but you really went through it.

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.

Definitely, there is a sense in my writing that people now know me in a personal way. And to an extent, that's true because I write about very personal things, and I use the personal often to contextualize some of these sociopolitical issues that we're dealing with. And to an extent, they're right. They know something about me.

I was the lead singer in a lot of the bands I was in. You have to be comfortable. You gotta get up there and sell the song. You have to get up there and sell the lyric. You gotta be able to feel it.

In music, you feel a connection to the voice and think about the person behind it. In art that's secondary.

I'll write about myself, or people I know, or archetypal characters, but the goal is to get at some truth, not to necessarily convey my own experience as an individual to the world.

I'm not on a record like some rapper trying to boast about my clothes or where I'm from. I'm creating stories, experiences, the way places make me feel, the way a person makes me feel.

The truth is, for however much my stories come out of things that have happened to me, they're not darkly or as deeply personal as someone like Marc Maron or a lot of comedians, but they are essentially my life and my interpretation of it.

I love to sing and I do think that my strength as a singer is... I think I have a voice that is certainly sufficient under most any circumstances... but I think my strength is that I really am an actor and I really do have to own what I am saying.

You have to write the story that's at the front of your head. There is no point in trying to write for the market; it won't ring true.

I've never considered myself a lyricist, but I have stuff to say.