No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

My father assigned me to keep his scrapbooks. At first I was interested in reading only his rave notices, but I got interested in reading what the critics were saying about whether the play was good or not.

A song must move the story ahead. A song must take the place of dialogue. If a song halts the show, pushes it back, stalls it, the audience won't buy it; they'll be unhappy.

Write what you feel. Write because of that need for expression.

The songwriter mustn't fall in love with his own song. If it doesn't belong, he can't push it into a show. Let him save it; maybe it'll fit in another show.

A songwriter should have friends who are similarly interested; should move about in the milieu of work he has chosen for himself.

A rhyme doesn't make a song.

Love is the reason you were born.

No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing.

A song just doesn't come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out.

There aren't more lady songwriters for the same reason that there aren't more lady doctors or lady accountants or lady lawyers; not enough women have the time for careers.

We've accumulated a lot of things over the years and many things from our grandmother. Hopefully it'll be all right. I really don't want to cry, but I can't help it.

I began to be impressed by what made a good book-how you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together.

In a show or a movie, one must work with many people. Many women just don't have the time for it.

The man in our society is the breadwinner; the woman has enough to do as the homemaker, wife and mother.

If you don't have a story that will hold the audience, you won't have a successful show.

I don't care how good a song is - if it holds back the storyline, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?

Keep it in tune with the times, but don't write with the specific purpose of trying to create a hit. If you're doing it strictly to make money, you're crazy. There are easier ways to make money.

I'm in the mood for love, simply because you're near me. Funny, but when you're near me I'm in the mood for love.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

In other words, I have no truck for anyone who goes out and does an eclectic building.

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.

So, in other words, how you respond to a sculpture, how a viewer sees the sculpture, is vital.

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.

The President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound... These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.

They call it golf because all the other four-letter words were taken.

In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

It seems to me that politicians ought to use the same words as other people.

I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence.

I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me.

You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it's like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen.

All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.

It does not require many words to speak the truth.

Gestures, in love, are incomparably more attractive, effective and valuable than words.

That's one strength that Stevie has. She's really not a strong instrumentalist in any way. Her instrument is her voice and her words. And it keeps her focused on the very center of that.