Top 144 Verse Quotes

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet’s abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we’ll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.

Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.

I would do musicals in high school where there was dancing, and I would sing my verse, and then they would choreograph it so when I would take an eight-count to back up to the back of the stage while the other dancers covered me up because my body was totally… I was always in newborn-deer mode.

At home and in church – which I didn’t go to a lot, I was very rebellious, but my family was strict Christians – they would ask us, ‘What’s the shortest verse in the Bible?’ and I was the one who always said ‘John 11:35’ straightaway. It stayed with me: the Bible has stayed with me.

There is a real formula to writing music, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. It’s very formulaic. The subject matter that you can address in pop music is somewhat restricted. It just doesn’t allow that same emotive quality that you can put into poetry.

Believe it or not, one of the first poets I was aware of was Yeats. I recited ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ at a verse speaking competition when I was eight or nine.

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

We have a great, positive relationship with Mexico. The Tijuana mayor crosses into San Diego, we talk all the time and vice verses. It’s about neighbors working together, and that’s my very clear message about a bi-national region that works. That’s a competitive advantage.

Life as a poet and actor truly became full circle as I stood on stage as host of ‘Verses & Flow’ and lived in both of these outfits. It was one of the best experiences of my professional life.

You don’t really gotta rap no more; you can just say the verse with a swag now.

You cannot find one single verse in the New Testament that calls for violence against non-believers. Jesus said to love your enemies. Muhammad said to butcher your enemies.

The blues is deceptively simple. Verse and chorus. Sometimes not even a chorus. Four bars that repeat, no Auto-Tune, electricity optional. It is the most direct, bare-bones of content. There is no interference between the head and heart.

When the Beatles wrote ‘Paperback Writer,’ it couldn’t have been the same old thing. You can hear so many influences in it, from the blues to Bach, and it’s not just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus. They start off singing a cappella, almost like a Bach chorale, and the song goes into this bluesy guitar riff.

Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, ‘Crank,’ with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.

You know, there’s an economy in lyric-writing that doesn’t afford you, or at least me – I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses.

I have seen women literally run into the abortion facility because someone was yelling Bible verses at them or pushing a graphic image in their faces.

Verse, singing, and speech have a common origin.

When I went to college, I made my first mixtape, and Sean gave me three verses for it. That was a big reason anyone ever listened to my music. I definitely wouldn’t be talking to you now if it wasn’t for Big Sean.

Poets these days, like artists and composers, have won for themselves almost unlimited freedom. You can pass yourself off as a painter without being able to draw, as a composer without being conscious of key relationships, and as a poet without making yourself familiar with traditional verse forms.

Woke Up Today’ is a number of different sections compounded together. There’s the melodica solo section which is three divisions; there’s the really funky thing in eleven before that, there’s the chorus and verse and there’s the ending which slows down and speeds up.

Democracy is not always chapter and verse, written out in advance.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.

I like it when I can sing half of a verse and throw the mike in some kid’s face, and they sing it right back to me.

Sometimes I’ll have sections that I’m not quite sure how they fit in the puzzle of a tune, they’ll get moved around; what I think was originally a verse ends up becoming the chorus, or what’s an intro gets dropped as a hook, things get shifted around a lot.

I think there’s one thing which distinguishes our art – we don’t consider. We don’t think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.

A song doesn’t happen as a whole verse; it happens linearly, line by line, almost word by word, phrase by phrase. And if each phrase, each line, has a proper emotional feel and connects to the line before it and the line after it, the song will be doing what it should be doing.

I feel that, every day, God molds me into someone that He wants me to be. So if that means just, like, talking to teammates and helping them out, or, like, every so often I’ll post a Bible verse on Twitter or Instagram.

In Ezekiel, chapter 33, verse 11, it says, that ‘God has no pleasure in the person that’s living in sin.’ He’s a loving God and he wants people to turn away from what they’re living in and he’ll give them life. That’s the message I’m trying to share, even though it comes across as harsh.

I’ve written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing – an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse – and that led to writing my own songs.

When I was writing ‘The Satanic Verses,’ if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn’t have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn’t seem to be a big deal.

I never put myself at a bragging point where I say, ‘I’m gonna have the illest verse.’

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn’t appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced… building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

My idea is to play with the people who you know want to get it right. Then it’s fun and easy to record, and you can get down to details, like taking out cymbals so the verse doesn’t dwarf the chorus, something like that.

The clear French landscape is as pure as a verse of Racine.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality worse than anything, and therefore, he uses free verse – though free verse is no guarantee against banality.

To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.

When you translate poetry in particular, you’re obliged to look at how the writer with whom you’re working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

When we did ‘Back In The Game’ on the Wu-Tang ‘Iron Flag’ album, I did a verse about gambling. I didn’t want to be ‘back in the game’ or ‘back on the block’ – that’s typical. I made it all metaphorical.

One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain’s chair of the Enterprise.

The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe.

My father would tell me if I wasn’t writing in meter verse, it wasn’t poetry.

The real Stephen Colbert is a practicing Catholic. He teaches Sunday school. He can recite chapter and verse of chapter and verse – from both the King James Bible and ‘The Lord of the Rings.’

The thing is, the way we write is all jams and bits and pieces that get pieced together and sometimes things are written with intentions of being a song, and then all of a sudden the main riff of this song, six months later turns into a verse or a chorus of another song.

I’ve learned not turning things up to full volume is a good idea. Also, because I have the freedom, sometimes when I’m writing a song I’ll get carried away with production when I’m only on the first verse, and that sacrifices the songwriting.