Top 144 Lyric Quotes

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

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.

In those days, it didn’t take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.

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.’

Ladies love a soppy lyric. There’s a real winner in ‘Carry You Home.’

My introduction of Whitney was that if there’s going to be one performer for the next generation who combined the beauty and lyric phrasing of a Lena Horne with those Gospel fiery roots of an Aretha Franklin, it would be Whitney Houston.

Clearly, the inhabitants of stable democracies find it hard to appreciate what they have: ‘You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone’ isn’t just a song lyric; it’s an expression of something fundamental about the human brain.

It’s very rare – and it does happen on occasion – where I’ll take a piece of lyric and I’ll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.

Pronouns really don’t matter in a song – ‘I’ or ‘he’ or ‘she’ or even subscribing a lyric to an inanimate object.

The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on ‘Pretty Hate Machine,’ came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.

Only a tiny portion of music history involves a singer and a lyric. Songs in music are generally thought to be a minor form.

My daughter, who is 7 years old – I have no idea where she learned this – she made a video where she’s beat-boxing. We have no idea where the beat-boxing came from, but all of a sudden, there it was. Now we’re launched into lyric sheets for every single song that is current. They’re all over our house.

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some published form so that, in principle, someone, somewhere, will be able to find it and read it. That is all I need, as a poet, and that is the beauty, the luxury of my position. My lyric is mine and remains mine. Nobody can ruin it.

Rock and roll doesn’t necessarily mean a band. It doesn’t mean a singer, and it doesn’t mean a lyric, really. It’s that question of trying to be immortal.

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.

Every single lyric I’ve ever written I meant.

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

‘The Ways of a Woman in Love’ is one of my very favorite early Johnny Cash songs. I like the way the lyric talks about the character walking by the girl’s house and wishing he was the one in her arms.

When I write a song, I get the melody right first, and then hopefully I can back it up with a lyric that has to respect the melody.

There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.

I just love doing radio. I’ve learned to be more vulnerable through radio than even I’ve been through books and writing lyrics. It’s a different type of experience where, if I’m writing a lyric, I can sort of hide behind it a little bit.

I was once making a burger for myself at my boyfriend’s house and a lyric started pouring out and I had to catch it, so I ran to another room to write it down, but then the kitchen caught fire. His cabinets were charred, and he was furious. But it was worth it for a song.

A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes.

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.

Every night we all felt grateful to be there, stunned at the amount of people that are there, and stunned at their reactions. They go crazy; they know every lyric from eight years of age to eighty. It’s unbelievable.

He doesn’t make it so complicated but just really allows the lyric to come through even though there’s a lot of production going on. I think that’s the key and that’s the magic, it’s making sure that people could still connect with the lyrics while they’re on the dance floor.

I tend to write out the first iteration of a lyric here and then go over here and make variations on it, on the page opposite.

Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man’s expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

George had performed musical alchemy, distilling the essence of Christmas into music. Adding a lyric which told the tale of betrayed love was a masterstroke and, as he did so often, he touched hearts.

There can be no proof that Blake’s lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so.

I’ve learned that in the theater the story is everything. Every lyric, every line and every musical gesture has to propel the journey of a given character or the overall plot.

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.

It’s such a weird process, songwriting, because you just have to feel it. There’s no right or wrong melody or lyric.

At first, I was using my sister Susan’s lyrics, as I could not write myself, only the music. And then one day, she and I had a fight, and she threatened to take away the lyrics from all the songs that I put the lyrics to, so it was that day that I began writing my first lyric to the music.

I’m not trying to dog any artist or genre, but to me, there is a lot of diversity missing from the radio. I miss turning the radio on and getting punched in the soul with a great lyric.

I’m lyric conscious. I like to tell stories, give advice. Instead of writing a ‘Dear Abby’ column, I do it on records.

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it’s a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography – Apollinaire’s ‘Calligrammes,’ that sort of thing.

But I wanted the karaoke-style lyrics in our music videos for two reasons: first, cause nobody has lyric booklets anymore, and when I was growing up, lyric booklets were like little bibles. I want people to be able to access our lyrics without having to go to some gnarly website with banner ads.

When I’m performing, sometimes a lyric will touch on my personal life, and it can be difficult to sing. For instance, when I sing ‘How I Love You,’ I’ll choke up.

Naming something, putting it on record, in a lyric, feels like affirming people. Ideally, that’s what politicians should want to do: to put laws or policies in place that speak to people’s experiences, to make them feel heard.

In my opinion, Lenny Bruce was more of an influence on Zappa’s satirical lyric’s than anyone that I know of.

The most amazing thing is being onstage and watching the audience sing every song lyric for lyric.

Most lyric poetry is about love, whether yearned after, fulfilled, or wistfully regretted; what isn’t tends to consist of laments and cris du coeur over this, that, and the other.

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.

When you do a lyric for ‘April in Paris,’ those who have heard it before can hear it in a different way now. It can add perspective to a great piece of music that does not have a lyric and may be inaccessible to lot of ears because people don’t deal with complex music very well.

I don’t really get shaken very much. People could heckle me, a spotlight could go out, I could forget a lyric… I’m not operating on somebody’s brain, you know what I mean? So I just think it’s all funny.