Nothing can affect my voice, it’s so bad.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Lettin‘ the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier ‚n puttin‘ it back in.

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

There is no greater index of character so sure as the voice.

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.

I’m giving all that I have in this life. I’m opening up my notebook, and I’m saying everything in there out loud.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

We have no right to express an opinion until we know all of the answers.

Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.

I just make the pictures and where they fall is where they fall. If somebody likes them, that’s always nice. And if they don’t like them, then too bad.

I’m so tough and so bad, I can be humble and lift another guy up.

When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

My father used to have an expression. He’d say, ‚Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about your place in your community.‘

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.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Some artists just ruin their voices because they don’t know any better.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

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.

When I listen to a song, I don’t say, ‚Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.‘ I’m thinking, ‚That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.‘

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

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.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.

The devil’s voice is sweet to hear.

I got a greater purpose. God put something in my heart to get across, and that’s what I’m going to focus on, using my voice as an instrument and doing what needs to be done.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person.

Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart, don’t know how to laugh either.

Swearing is industry language. For as long as we’re alive it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be boisterous to get results.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.