Although I was able to study music with teachers, I never studied lyric writing. I read poetry, and I read other lyricists. But they were never writing in the style or the form that I was interested in.
I feel I should try to reveal. When you hit it right, you produce an emotional response in the listener that can be cathartic. When you’re wrong, you’re soppy, sentimental.
I see a correlation between short stories and songs, because of their length and for what they’re meant to evoke. Combine certain words with melodies and it all becomes very moving.
The more I get to thinking, the less I tend to laugh.
The only time that love is an easy game is when two other people are playing it.
To get the stuff out of you, especially if what you’re dealing with is yourself, requires you to open up and touch tender spots. You have to be anesthetized a little bit.
The leaves that are green turn to brown. And they wither with the wind. And they crumble in your hand.
Take two bodies and you twirl them into one, their hearts and their bones, and they won’t come undone.
By the time I was 12 or 13, I felt that I was special, because I could play the guitar and write songs.
Cecilia was made in a living room on a Sony. It was like a little piece of magical fluff, bur it works. El Condor Pasa a Los Incas record that I love. Bridge is a very strong melodic song.
A phenomenon occurs but because you’re in the middle of it, you just think it’s your life-until it’s over. And then you look back and say, What an unusual thing happened to me in the ’60s.
I didn’t get how big it was until I went home, turned on the television and saw it on all the news, and later that night on the front pages of all the newspapers. Then I got it.
Anthony Heilbut has been a guide and a mentor to me. I know of no one who has the love and depth of knowledge of this extraordinary author.
Jay Ashby is simply a great musician!
Breakdowns come, and breakdowns go.
I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers, still crazy after all these years.
I met my old lover on the street last night, she seemed glad to see me.
Justice Stevens is one of those who are most sensitive to the least powerful in our society.
These are the days of lasers in the jungle, staccato signals of constant information...
The risk of failure is part of the fun of what I do.