Songs In Quotes

#1. The masses do not see the Sirens. They do not hear songs in the air. Blind, deaf, stooping, they pull at their oars in the hold of the earth. But the more select, the captains, harken to a Siren within them ... and royally squander their lives with her.

Nikos Kazantzakis

#2. I find the greatest songs in the world come out of pain, and I don't like it! Here's what it does: It strips away all of your facade. It makes you so honest. It's cleansing.

Lionel Richie

#3. I like songs in all different genres and types. My production and songwriting is everything from pop rock to hip-hop and everything in between.

Alex Clare

#4. Just as a blues player can play 20 blues songs in a row but find a way to make each one different, ... I always want to find different ways to do something

Joe Satriani

#5. I've always had a bazillion songs in my archive, but I want to play people stuff they know. Now that I have two albums' worth of material, that gives me freedom to compose a set that's more well-balanced and build a show rather than just a recital of some songs.

Kate Voegele

#6. I think that it's so powerful for me to go see someone like Bridget Everett at Joe's Pub and watch her weave her songs in and out of these funny, tragic stories - you can talk and sing and it's not this horrible offense, you're going to get thrown in artistic jail.

Kathleen Hanna

#7. I do like writing songs in a band. When it's rock, it's such a different kind of dynamic, obviously.

Colin Hay

#8. I was immersed in popular songs of the time, of the '30s and '40s. I was writing songs, making fun of the attitudes of those songs, in the musical style of the songs themselves; love songs, folk songs, marches, football.

Tom Lehrer

#9. I love nothing more than to perform my songs in front of a live audience. And whatever I'm doing is driven toward finding or writing songs and putting out hit songs that drive people coming to see me live. Because, at the end of the day, that's what I enjoy the most.

Luke Bryan

#10. To the birds you gave songs, the birds gave you songs in return. You gave me only a voice, yet asked for more, thus I sing.

Rabindranath Tagore

#11. Only a tiny portion of music history involves a singer and a lyric. Songs in music are generally thought to be a minor form.

Russell Smith

#12. Worship is more than singing beautiful songs in church on a Sunday. It is more than instruments and music. As a true worshipper, your heart will long to worship Him at all times, in all ways and with all your life.

Darlene Zschech

#13. There are probably five songs in the world that I get excited about when I hear them on the radio.

Sia Furler

#14. Song for the Puberty Rite of a Girl Named Cowaka:
A poor man takes the songs in his hand
And drops them near the place where the sun sets.
See, Cowaka, run to them and take them in your hand,
And place them under the sunset.

Frances Densmore

#15. Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you're mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time.

Tom Waits

#16. As far as Rap goes Tupac was my favorite, I used to sing some of his songs in my set before I ever met his dad.

Michael Tolcher

#17. How come no one writes songs in the key of B?

John Arnold

#18. We've written something like 900 songs in all.

Barry Mann

#19. There are so many songs in me that haven't been born yet. So I can't call myself a genius, but I never turn away a compliment, and I feel like I'm on my way to that mountain.

R. Kelly

#20. I prance around and dance by myself to hip-hop songs in the mirror.

Liz Phair

#21. I really like telling stories. When I was a kid, I wanted to write songs. In quite a fundamental, gratifying, childish way, I enjoy the doing of telling a story.

Paul Bettany

#22. Yes, I'm fine. That song is just - " Stanton stopped himself for a moment, but then he laughed. "Out of all the songs in all the world, you had to pick that one?

Brad Boney

#23. When people come and see me, I want them to experience joy. I don't do any sad songs in my show. It's to lift the spirit.

Darlene Love

#24. I could write six songs in one day with everything that's going on.

Alanis Morissette

#25. We recorded several of Kenny's songs in the living room of my home.

Jim Messina

#26. I never want to listen to the songs in front of people close to me. There's an emotional honesty in that place where it's not earnest but it's vulnerable.

Yannis Philippakis

#27. The songs of Bizet are by a French peer of Rossini. When Rossini stopped composing, he was living in Paris. He also wrote some beautiful songs in French.

Cecilia Bartoli

#28. Other musicians are basically personalities who want to make a name for themselves. All I do is sing old songs in the best way I can. What else is there to know? If you were a blacksmith, what would people need to know about you other than whether you can make a good horseshoe?

Leon Redbone

#29. I started writing songs in high school and always wanted to have a band, and eventually my creative endeavors developed into Theocracy. So in some ways, you could say the vision has been there since I started writing songs.

Matt Smith

#30. I love listening to pop songs in Spanish and Italian.

Stjepan Hauser

#31. Getting a gay fan base is slow. I think if I were able to reach more gay people they would love it. I can't get the songs in their ears. I love my gay family. I just wish I could reach more of them. I'm in this car going from club to club but they're not gay clubs.

Mary Gauthier

#32. No one will sing songs in our memory. We are the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. Our traditions and memories live only in these Annals. We are our own mourners.

Glen Cook

#33. When I finally decided to do the show, I only had two weeks to learn the choreography and the songs in French.

LaToya Jackson

#34. Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it - I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?

Sarah Ruhl

#35. Do we really have to wander around apologizing for enjoying plot, just because James Wood and a few dozen other arch-aesthetes sniff at it? It's like being careful not to sing pop songs in the shower because some guy in the local alt-weekly is a music snob.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden

#36. I don't want to be 35 years old and still popping out songs in miniskirts and la-la-la.

Holly Valance

#37. It is such a gift to be able to write songs in general, but when you can share it with somebody, it is just such a pleasure. It is such a happy moment when you finish a song, and you are just like, 'Wow - that was great.'

Valerie June

#38. I've been writing a lot of songs in twos, songs that are like twins in my mind.

Angel Olsen

#39. I sang the songs in 'The Doors'.

Val Kilmer

#40. We've always been a band who's taken forever to do things. After writing 'Persona' I think we wrote about four songs in three years!

Drew Goddard

#41. I've written a lot about southern California, but I don't use the same characters. Leave the people in the songs in the songs, is my philosophy.

John Darnielle

#42. Long live protest songs, in whatever form they take.

David Levithan

#43. I am very busy and don't have a lot of down time, but I write my best songs in those situations. I enjoy my life the most when I have a bunch of things going on at the same time.

Kate Voegele

#44. I had to go into a studio and compose and write and press up 12 songs in 14 hours. When you're recording a song from scratch it takes you 14 hours to do just one song.

Grandmaster Flash

#45. I try not to write songs in which men glamorize their own need for approval from women. That's kinda a bogus way to go out. But I try to do this quietly. I'm not about to go around telling people how they should or shouldn't think. My feminism is for me.

John Darnielle

#46. A DJ can't just play one song. It's about playing a set, or how you connect songs in those two hours, and where you place them.

Zedd

#47. I long ago learned that you can't expect people to interpret the songs in the way they had meant for you, as the writer.

PJ Harvey

#48. I don't like hearing Beatles songs in commercials. It almost renders them useless. I think, 'Oh God, another one bites the dust.'

Tom Waits

#49. There's a category for me. I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste.

Sarah Vaughan

#50. It was dark and misty for 2 weeks, and I didn't come up with a thing. Suddenly the sun shone and it was, 'Wow, look at those beautiful Alps.' I wrote 'Mr. Blue Sky' and 13 other songs in the next two weeks.

Jeff Lynne

#51. But Dad and I are the only father-and-daughter acts who have both had No. 1 songs in England.

Lily Allen

#52. In some songs, like propaganda songs-and don't get me wrong, I love some propaganda songs. They're some of my favorite songs in the world. It's just that I don't enjoy writing it.

Iron & Wine

#53. I don't hide my being Israeli. I say it in every interview. I put out a record with songs in Hebrew. The people who signed me have no connection to Judaism or Israel.

Yael Naim

#54. I think the concept of commercials, for example, I have had offers to do songs in different commercials, and it is not what I have liked.

Chris Cornell

#55. I always loved song writers who wrote songs in the first person, so it's kind of like that.

Cameron Crowe

#56. As a kid in Africa, you were so connected to nature itself because you went farming, watched the moon out at night, observed how the sky was different, and how the birds chanted different songs in the evening and the morning.

Ishmael Beah

#57. We're all just songs in the end. If we are lucky.

George R R Martin

#58. See, I'm not the type of writer that has 400 songs in a suitcase someplace on the shelf. I'm sort of a rise-to-the-occasion-type of writer, so when I know I'm going to record, I get in the mood to write.

Luther Vandross

#59. I do love to interpret songs in American Sign Language.

Sean Berdy

#60. I learnt early on that your audience take the songs in the way they want to rather than the way you might want them too.

Gil Scott-Heron

#61. I never look for music by genre. I look for an artist who puts a dependable trademark on things. Like Elvis Costello - he's a great songwriter who presents his songs in a number of contexts. I feel the same about my own music.

Todd Rundgren

#62. I just want my songs to be memorable, and for people to hear my songs in ten year's time and remember the great times they had while listening to 'em.

Cher Lloyd

#63. I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn't. The second just outnumbered the first.

Tom Lehrer

#64. There are a lot of bad worship songs, in my opinion, but there are a lot of good ones, too.

Michael W. Smith

#65. 54Your statutes have been my songs in the house of my sojourning. 55I remember your name in the night, O LORD, and keep your law. 56This blessing has fallen to me, that I have kept your precepts.

Anonymous

#66. When you listen to the music in this film [Despicable Me], it's working on the level of melody, but the other key element is lyrics. There are a number of songs in the film where the lyrics themselves are very much speaking to the essence of what Ted Geisel was setting out to do.

Christopher Meledandri

#67. I'm like a bad musical cliche because I bring my guitar on the road and try to write songs in hotel rooms.

Moby

#68. Ever since I was younger I wanted to be on stage, singing my songs in a glittering costume. And that happened and is still happening. I have to remember that this is what I wished for and be grateful because there are 500 other girls right behind me that are ready to snatch it up.

Katy Perry

#69. I'm not like other writers. I'm not hung up on using my own songs. In fact, my sister Bunny always tells me I sing other people's songs better than my own. She says I loosen up and give the songs a different feel.

El DeBarge

#70. It's amazing to know that 5 years ago I was writing songs in a basement in the ghetto and now I'm writing for Michael Jackson. I'd be a fool not to say it's a dream come true.

R. Kelly

#71. We just sang real simple songs in a simple way that got to people. We didn't try to tart them up with orchestral arrangements and all the stuff. We were all blues fanatics. We like R+B and blues and simple, gut-feeling music.

Mick Ralphs

#72. Hearing my songs in public freaks me out a bit. There was one restaurant I really liked in L.A., but I had to stop going there when they started playing my music. It felt kinda awkward.

Fiona Apple

#73. The sun rose yellow as a lemon.
The sky was round and blue.
The birds looped clear water songs in the air.
Will and Jim leaned from their windows.
Nothing had changed.
Except the look in Jim's eyes.
"Last night ... " said Will. "Did or didn't it happen?

Ray Bradbury

#74. I was lost
And sang my broken-down songs in the hell of the hour.
Then in my heart moved an oar,
And I was found by a breeze from a door in the sea of forms
And was rowed to the cherry trees on the shore.

Stan Rice

#75. I've been writing more songs in my head," he said, "about being a ghost and a shade." His face turned smooth and solemn. "How I'd die all over again just to touch you.

Jeri Smith-Ready

#76. I disconnected myself to shield myself from people who would sway to my songs in the club and call me 'nigger' in the street. They were too busy seeing their own preconceived image of a Negro woman. the image that I chose to give them was of a woman who they could not reach and therefore can't hurt.

Lena Horne

#77. Britains still commemorate the Battle of Cable Street in London. There are still pop songs in Britain that reference Sir Oswald Mosley and his black shirts.

Rachel Maddow

#78. The point of making records for me isn't to hear 300 songs in 50 minutes; it's to hear the 50-minute piece of music.

Girl Talk

#79. I enjoy singing my songs in front of people.

Frank Ocean

#80. He'd heard many songs in his life, sang thousands of them himself, but the sweetest music imaginable played for him in that moment: the sound of Sophie - the woman of his dreams - calling out his name, over and over again as together they reached their peak.

Jess Dee

#81. I don't love playing new songs in a festival environment. Because when it comes to a festival a lot of people probably won't know your band really well at all so playing more familiar songs is a little more conducive in having a better show.

Jack Barakat

#82. Jay became an adult. He got a job, married a wife, and they had a child. Now he had so many things to take care! Like all other grown ups, he talked more of being busy than of being happy. He completely forgot the little bird singing beautiful songs in his heart.

Ilchi Lee

#83. I'm the kind of cat that can finish three songs in a day. Two or three songs in a day. If my voice is up to it and I feel up to it, I can finish two or three songs in a day.

Ginuwine

#84. I try to write songs. At our concerts, we take the cream of the crop from my back catalogue and I don't know if I could write something now that would replace any of that. We don't lose any of the standards. We have lots of songs in rotation.

Gordon Lightfoot

#85. I've just always written songs in a style that appeal to me personally.

Lyle Lovett

#86. I do original songs in the style of other artists, where I try to learn all their musical idiosyncrasies and try to do something that sounds like them and yet is a bit more sick and twisted.

Al Yankovic

#87. I would never put my songs in a commercial.

Tom Petty

#88. I started writing an album on flights to Africa and Brazil, but it was crazy because I left the notebook on the plane. It had seven or eight songs in it. After that, I'm not writing any more songs on notebooks - and I keep my Blackberry close!

Estelle

#89. I aim to write songs in a way that you don't have to have gone to Ghana to relate to it, you really just have to have a heart.

Jason Mraz

#90. I am pregnant with song. My body aches but do not betray me. I will sing songs and hide them away. I will tear them into bits and throw them in the street. The streets of my city are full of dark holes. I will hide my songs in the holes of the streets.

Sherwood Anderson

#91. In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.

Franz Kafka

#92. There are millions of songs in the world, and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. Making the connections is part of the fun of being a fan.

Rob Sheffield

#93. The songs in 'Wonderland' don't have a melodic life for me - I'm not a musical person - but they have an emotional life, an emotional echo perhaps.

Stacey D'Erasmo

#94. Right now I feel so inspired, it's hard to believe. I've written about 20 songs in the last two days. I'd gone about four months without writing a thing.

Tommy Bolin

#95. The problem was, they advertised their product as a "5GB mp3 player." It is exactly the same message as Apple's "1,000 songs in your pocket." The difference is Creative told us WHAT their product was and Apple told us WHY we needed it.

Simon Sinek

#96. I was a grill cook at McDonalds for a little bit. I did landscape for a little bit. I played a lot in the bar scene, I played countless sets of acoustic songs in that arena.

Aaron Lewis

#97. It's taken a long time but eventually when I had the songs in place and demos right and I found myself a manager, that's when everything started happening quickly but I think that's always the way it is.

James Blunt

#98. People said when I started, 'Why don't you just copy your father's style?' I had to be myself, singing my songs in my own way.

Natalie Cole

#99. I will be gone from here and sing my songs/ In the forest wilderness where the wild beasts are,/ And carve in letters on the little trees/ The story of my love, and as the trees/ Will grow letters too will grow, to cry/ In a louder voice the story of my love.

Virgil

#100. I'm not Prince Charming. I'm the bad guy that sneaks into the castle when Prince Charming is off singing songs in the woods. I'm the one with the big cock that bends needy Cinderella over. And I'm the one that makes her scream until her throat's raw and she can't sing a note.

Kenya Wright