I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it’s poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.

The song ‚Innocent‘ is a song that I wrote about something that really, really emotionally impacted me.

I write music every day.

It’s insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it’s assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It’s that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he’s telling you something about his own life. It’s so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

Writing ‚We Are Never Getting Back Together‘ was one of the most hilarious experiences I have ever had in the studio because it just happened so naturally.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.

I’d like to do a completely off-the-wall collaboration. I would like one of my songs to be the hook to a rap song. That would be so much fun!

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

I’ve been composing music all my life and if I’d been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

Songs are my diaries; they always have been. You have to put your trust in everyone because putting down those real, personal details and thoughts that make a song authentic also opens you right up. I am constantly misunderstood; a lot of people just don’t get me.

Songwriters, you have to work – you have to wait for residuals. You have to pray that the song’s going to be a hit. And then a year later, you might get a check.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

My songs have always been frustrating themes, relationships that I’ve had. And now that I’m in love, I expect it to be really happy, or at least there won’t be half as much anger as there was.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn‘ fool if they weren’t.

I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less.

I usually write lyrics first, and then when I get home or close to any kind of instrument, I usually make a melody for those lyrics.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

In my songs, I’m not saying something that’s never been said before. The have lyrics aren’t going to blow people away. It’s the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

Every story has its demands.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

I’m the kind of person who needs to feel like everything happens for a reason. When you date a guy and it goes badly, that’s horrible. But if you can write a song about it, then it was worth it.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

I read poetry to save time.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

I play a lot of instruments. I write all my own music. I spend hours and hours a day in the studio. I’m a producer. I’m a writer.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

I always wanted to know, and I always used to daydream, about what it would be like to stand on a really big stage and sing songs for a lot of people, songs that I had written… Daydreaming was kind of my No. 1 thing when I was little, because I didn’t have much of a social life going on.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.