The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.

I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.

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.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset – tears are words waiting to be written.

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

Fashion is an imposition, a reign on freedom.

I come here tonight as a sister, blessed with a brother who is my mentor, my protector and my lifelong friend. And I come here as a wife who loves my husband and believes he will be an extraordinary president.

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.‘

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

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.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

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

I’m just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.

A man is more frank and sincere with his emotions than a woman. We girls, I’m afraid, have a tendency to hide our feelings.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

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

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

Music comes to me more readily than words.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

A yawn is a silent shout.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

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.‘

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

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.

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

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

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.

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

When I say ‚Crush your enemy‘, I don’t literally mean it.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

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

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

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 hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse. So for me, it’s a great thing to be able to scream and say whatever I want.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

A letter does not blush.

I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Language is the dress of thought.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

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

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

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.

All my momma’s people were very musical. My grandpa, who was the Pentecostal minister, he was a great musician. He played the fiddle, he played the piano.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

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.

Saying nothing… sometimes says the most.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.