Top 100 Spm Lyric Quotes
#1. Damn Lyric, it isn't torture. It's travel. Get some sleep."
- Sabine
J.W. Ellis
#2. I have a little dictaphone and if a sound takes my fancy or if a lyric comes to me in the middle of the night I'll just record it there and then.
Barry Gibb
#3. Something taken off the page can sound great, I guess. Usually it doesn't. It seems like lately Pitchfork is trying to champion lyric writers more.
Stephen Malkmus
#4. But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.
Evelyn Waugh
#5. I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.
Langston Hughes
#6. I tend to write poetry that is rich in data of various sorts. The lyric poem isn't perfectly suited to accommodating such data, so I've had to find new ways to say everything that I want to say.
Campbell McGrath
#7. I'm conflicted about the lyric tattoo thing. I feel like that's a lifetime decision, and I always feel like, 'I hope you don't regret this a couple years from now when you get tired of that song.'
Sam Hunt
#8. It all starts from the lyric with me. If I work really hard on the lyric and get it right, then it will tell me whatever else to do, where to go.
Scott Walker
#9. A happy memory is perhaps on this earth truer than happiness itself.
Alfred De Musset
#10. Anything is food for starting a song. A song can start with a lyric idea or a melody or just a sound that inspires.
Alison Goldfrapp
#11. Not sure if you know this. But when we first met, I got so nervous I couldn't speak
Shane Filan
#12. I feel like for me the lyric writing really comes from just what's going on in my heart and that's what consumes me; think a lot of our heart is relationships. Not just with boyfriend or girlfriend but all your relationships in your life with other people and our interactions with other humans.
Amy Lee
#13. I try and journal every day, and that's where a lot of my lyric comes from.
Jessie Baylin
#14. I'm not a lyric writer to make statements. What I enjoy doing is making paintings with lyrics, creating colorful images. I think that's more what entertainment and music should be.
Chris Cornell
#15. I don't wanna be a lover,
I just wanna be your victim.
Elvis Costello
#16. I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.
Edward Hirsch
#17. Everything stems from real experiences but I do also have a very vivid imagination. A song lyric gets easily carried away with itself and can end up somewhere I'd never have predicted.
Imogen Heap
#18. A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.
John Drinkwater
#19. In the half light of morning, in a world between the sheets
I swear I saw her angel wing, my vision was complete
from TIGHTROPE - Stone Roses
Matt Squire
#20. I understand that transposing a song a half step can effect the believability of a lyric.
Trey Anastasio
#21. I'm a lyric soprano. I can try to step outside that and do different kind of singing, but it's not something I can sustain over the long haul, and what is good for your voice is good for your career.
Victoria Clark
#22. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Seamus Heaney
#23. 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.
Richie Sambora
#24. There're lots of musicians in my family, too. My mother sings incredibly well. I've got to make a record with my mother's voice on it. She sings a lyric soprano. We do the opposite. I'm a baritone. She's a star singer in her church. She always does her solo.
Grace Jones
#25. Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.
John Updike
#26. I started doing shows in places that I couldn't pronounce, didn't know existed, and I've seen people that didn't speak English or Spanish rapping to every lyric and singing to every hook. I said, "This is the type of music that I want to do."
Pitbull
#27. It was a little at a time but I broke out my Walkman and my lyric pad and started writing.
Lou Gramm
#28. There exists a kind of laughter which is worthy to be ranked with the higher lyric emotions and is infinitely different from the twitching of a mean merrymaker.
Nikolai Gogol
#29. There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
Gyorgy Ligeti
#30. Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth, a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both laughing and lyric.
Victor Hugo
#31. I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise.
Leo Kottke
#32. Rick Black writes with the honed elegance of a poet so in command of lyric sentiment and the efficient evocative use of language that what results is indeed as urgent and vulnerable as true prayer ... There is something profoundly human and completely necessary about Star of David.
Kwame Dawes
#33. I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.
Stephen Sondheim
#34. You know, when I did 'American Idol' the three times, I tried to tell these kids you have to tell the story of the lyric.
Barry Manilow
#35. I want to suggest a feeling. It's ridiculous to assume you can state an opinion. Somebody else can never relate to the lyric in the same way because their whole experience is different. You can only suggest, then people add their own history and experience to the lyrics.
Danielle Dax
#36. As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time.
Adam Schlesinger
#37. The reading of the song is vital. The written word is first always ... first. Not belittling the music, but it really is a backdrop. To convey the meaning of a song you need to look at the lyric and understand it.
Frank Sinatra
#38. It's funny how the littlest things can make you feel larger than life; the right lyric, the most heartfelt melody, the clearest message. Love.
Alex Gaskarth
#39. I don't know karate, but I know ka-razy!
James Brown
#40. I'm a lyric man - I'm always looking for meaningful songs.
Tom Jones
#41. Usually now a song starts just in my head with a melody or a lyric idea coming first.Then typically I'll go to a guitar, unless it's a instrumental then I'll usually build it on a keyboard instrument.
Eliot Lewis
#42. I tend to write at the piano, but usually the melody and lyrics come first. Like, I'll be in the shower, and I'll start singing, and the melody and the lyric will just come out. Then I'll quickly try to finish the shower, try to remember it, record it on my phone and save it for the studio.
Eliza Doolittle
#43. They won't really shoot us, will they?" Faith whispered as they started forward.
"I'll pretend I'm in labor if they do any funny stuff," Angelina said in a low voice. "Pregnant women always scare the shit out of men.
Maya Banks
#44. A third characteristic is the deliberate multi-styled and heterovoiced nature of all these genres. They reject the stylistic unity (or better, the single-styled nature) of the epic, the tragedy, high rhetoric, the lyric.
Mikhail Bakhtin
#45. The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
Brian Eno
#46. My advice to singers is always the same: 'Don't sing the song, sing the lyric.'
Mitch Leigh
#47. I think the overall mood of the music informs the artwork, but I've found that good lyrics can be inspirational, too.
Neil Farber
#48. He is a lyric poet ... aloof from the swirling currents in which many of his colleagues are immersed.
Samuel Barber
#49. I know that that doesn't make even a little bit of sense. That was the point, that beautiful incongruence.
Hank Green
#50. The Republican convention, an event with the intellectual content of a Guns'n'Roses lyric attended by every ofay insurance brokerin America who owns a pair of white shoes.
P. J. O'Rourke
#52. A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.
Lou Rawls
#53. That's really what was wonderful for me growing up, since I got to know so many of the songwriters who liked me and thought I had talent. They would then tell me how to read a lyric and sing a song, and challenge me to try and find a different end to a song.
Margaret Whiting
#54. I don't have any favourite lyrics. Honestly, all of them I love 'em to death - it's the same with songs. I don't have just one favourite lyric, I love them all.
ASAP Rocky
#55. I was raised in Catholic school where we were given a lot of heavy literature and a dense, weighty lyric wasn't strange to me. I didn't need everything to be light and simple for me to see the beauty in it.
Jennifer Warnes
#56. When you're moving in the positive, your destination is the brightest star.
Stevie Wonder
#57. I began thinking about the idea of a 24 hour concert. What if you tied songs to certain hours of the day - creating a 24 hour world of lyric and melody. So that was the inspiration for this project.
Jon Foreman
#58. The fundamental message of the Wu Tang music is as vast as the ocean in all reality, but it's still a straight path. You can take one lyric and by researching what that lyric is giving out to you, it should give you more than a day's worth of school, maybe three days' worth of school.
RZA
#59. In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros.
Forrest Gander
#60. The assholes took their toll." "Assholes often do." "That's a Billboard Top Forty song waiting to happen." "Sung to the tune of 'There'll Be Sad Songs,'" I suggested, then offered up a lyric. "'There'll be assholes, to make you cry.'" "'Assholes often dooo,'" Mallory sang.
Chloe Neill
#61. All you ever did was...WRECK ME...
-Wrecking Ball
Miley Cyrus
#62. The title song of David Bowie's 'Young Americans' is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul.
Jon Landau
#63. If you rank me with the lyric poets, my exalted head shall strike the stars.
[Lat., Quod si me lyricis vatibus inseris,
Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.]
Horace
#64. You can have a great lyric and a so-so melody; it's going to be a tough sell.
Herb Alpert
#65. Dear Diary,
Today I met a boy
He stole my heart...
And won't give it back
Lyric
#66. Historically, there are hierarchies of purity. Certain aspects of poetry are very, very pure. The lyric poem can't be anything but the lyric poem.
Vijay Seshadri
#67. I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist.
David Levithan
#68. I like to get a vibe first, then a melody and really beat up the melody for a while, then try and find a lyric that really suits him/her.
Matt Squire
#69. It's a breath you took too late.
It's a death that's worse than fate.
Elvis Costello
#70. A good example of a lyric that makes me laugh but might not hit anybody right away is, "Sit behind the guitar and play the chords," just because it's such a lame image. It's not rock'n'roll at all to be sitting behind a guitar.
Tim Heidecker
#71. In Nashville, there is a historic tendency to work the lyric to death while settling for music that works. In pop or rock, it can be the other way around.
Michael Kosser
#72. When I say a spoken Hebrew sentence, half of it is like the King James Bible and half of it is a hip-hop lyric. It has a roller-coaster effect.
Etgar Keret
#73. I'm not so in with the prescriptive avant-garde agenda. I can do that sort of thing, but I feel that I'm still interested enough in song structure. When I look at a lyric on the page, the lyric is alive to me, looking like soldiers in a field. I can move it around, and it's very black-and-white.
Scott Walker
#74. I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
#75. There's a girl in this dress,
there's always a girl in distress.
Elvis Costello
#76. 'Dawn (Go Away)' is a sad lyric, but the melody is so happy and fun.
Erich Bergen
#77. I don't find the songs; they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come.
James Taylor
#78. Trouble, Troublemaker yeah that's your middle name
Ooh
Olly Murs
#80. Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.
Stephen Sondheim
#81. Metaphors are not user-friendly. They're difficult to find and difficult to use well. Unfortunately, metaphors are a mainstay of good lyric writing-indeed of most creative writing ... metaphors support lyrics like bones.
Pat Pattison
#82. The road, lyric-wise, is a trap, and a bore. Maybe it's interesting to me, but I don't think it's a connecting thing with other humans. What is there to write about? Truck stops, hotels, clubs?
Dean Wareham
#83. Blessing still wanted to fight, but Lyric stood in between them with her gun pointed at Ty. She was tired of all the drama and just wanted him to leave her the hell alone. Ty
Mesha Mesh
#84. My music is basically all about witty punchlines and lyric progression that is aimed to make you laugh or say "Woah."
Mike Stud
#85. Gangnam is a territory in Seoul, Korea. I describe it as noble at the daytime and going crazy at the night time. I compare ladies to the territory. So - noble at the daytime, going crazy at the night time - and the lyric says I am the right guy for the lady who is like that.
Psy
#87. The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.
Kevin Hart
#89. Hell hath no fury like a queen scorned. ...
... That would be the last time he made a crack about being a flamer to someone with a flamethrower for hands. Though he'd really lost it when Raven sang the lyric to Disco Inferno.
J.T. Bock
#90. And what I also couldn't take anymore was this look of disgust on Lyric's face as she stared at me like this was all my fault. She seemed repulsed at the possibility of Tim being my father.
Jessica N. Watkins
#91. There are some songs where I'll have had the music for 20 years and then finally the lyric will come through. That's not common but it does happen. Then there are other songs that come really quickly.
Tim Finn
#92. But Lyric isn't sexy. She's fun, ridiculously happy, effortlessly beautiful, life-saving, and mind-blowing amazing. Sexy doesn't even begin to sum her up.
Jessica Sorensen
#93. A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.
Claudia Rankine
#94. And we dance all night to The Best Song ever!
-One Direction
One Direction
#95. Sometimes I'll be driving and a lyric will come into my head, and I will have to pull over and record it on my phone.
Lil' Kim
#96. We love great melodies and great songs that have great hooks and melodies, so we start a little bit more on that side as opposed to other people that start more lyric-based. Sometimes we'll do it the other way.
Dave Haywood
#97. I still get a little nervous before performing. You don't want to forget a lyric; you don't want to make a mistake. I still get butterflies. You can try to judge an audience, but you can only really judge things by the applause.
Tony Bennett
#98. Poets should be law-givers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the civil code, and the day's work.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#99. The song could start with a riff that I base the song around. Or a chord progression or a melody I have, I just write a story about it. Lyric-wise, it's cool to have someone else's input too.
Orianthi
#100. The popular songs that were written in the 1920s and '30s, '40s and early '50s were written by veterans - mostly men who'd had experience in life. How can you write a lyric if you haven't really lived life?
Rudy Vallee
