Lyrical Mastery Quotes

R. Kelly is different - music is always going through his brain. I remember we'd be having a conversation, and he'd choose a word I said and write a whole song to it.

I've got magic. I've got poetry at my fingertips.

From the outside-in, Atlanta is kind of perceived as like popcorn. People don't respect it as having artists such as myself and EarthGang and other lyrical talents and album-worthy artists.

Songwriting is best. It's the hardest ... finest ... tightest. It also requires the most discipline.

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.

If Woody Guthrie set the bar for American songwriters, Bob Dylan jumped right over it. No one I know will ever come close to possessing the beauty of melody and the use of language that Dylan shares with us, with ease.

A good rapper is an amazing thing to me. It's like a 17th-, 18th-century poet.

I want to be like Chris Brown meets Jay Z. Chris is a singer, a dancer, a complete powerhouse on stage and Jay Z is not just a popular musician, but also a lyrical genius, a business mogul, who knows how to be classy.

Bob has never written a bad song. Bob Dylan is a genius.

I've been on the songs of all these rappers that put out an album, and my music is still better.

Imagine a singer with the virtuosity of Joan Sutherland or Ella Fitzgerald, the public persona of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the audience of Elvis, and you have Umm Kulthum.

I've come to recognize songwriting as something that I do, and I want to be good at that. At that craft, if you like. I want to practice it.

All of my records have been very personal, just writing more and more songs, you get better at being able to say what you feel.

The world doesn't need any more pretty good songs.

Me and Future, we did 'Dirty Sprite,' 'Ain't No Way Around It,' 'Turn on the Lights.' Every time we record, we're setting bars.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

To write a song and have it embraced by someone, even one person, I don't think that's something that everyone gets to experience.

A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland.

Fools, art is a heavy task, more heavy than gold crowns; it's far more difficult to match firm words than armies, they're disciplined troops, unconquered, to be placed in rhythm, the mind's most mighty foe, and not disperse in air. I'd give, believe me, a whole land for one good song, for I know well that only words, that words alone, like the high mountains, have no fear of age or death.

O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies, O skilled to sing of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages.

I didn't feel like I was allowed to be a songwriter. I thought I had to be a really intelligent lyricist, like a poet.