A Quote by Sam Phillips

Feeling has as much to say as the words do. You can have the greatest words in the world and if they're not believable, they don't strike a chord and they're not said convincingly, it's not a great song.

Sam Phillips

Quote Topics

Believable Chord Feeling Great Greatest Much Said Say Song Strike Words World

Quote Author

Sam Phillips
American - Businessman
Born: January 28, 1962

The hardest part is writing a song as a story. A song is so short and there are only so many words that every line has to hit. The words have to flow. You can't say certain words that sound weird next to each other, you can't repeat words too much.

Giveon

If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologize for that. I ought to prune, pare and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words—strike that, I love words—and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too.

Stephen Fry

Sentir mon Cœur is a privilege only granted to the exceptional man - the one who has the ability to find words that exactly (or, to himself, convincingly) express his feelings... The value of words help to define the feeling itself... The common failure is to allow habitual words and phrases, flowing spontaneously from the memory, to determine and deform the feelings.

Herbert Read

'Words, Words, Words' was very much its title. It's just words, words, words and trying to show that I can pack as much material into an hour as I possibly could word count-wise.

Bo Burnham

Words are important to me, but a song can work and function and be a good song with words that are fairly standard. But really great lyrics can't rescue a dog of a song.

Jarvis Cocker

With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.'

T. S. Eliot

All people in the world - who are not hermits or mutes - speak words. They speak different languages, but they speak words. They say, "How are you" or "I'm not feeling well" all over the world. These common words - these common elements that we have between us - the writer has to take some verbs and nouns and pronouns and adjectives and adverbs and arrange them in a way that sound fresh.

Maya Angelou

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

John Trudell

One listens to a piece of great music, say, and feels deeply moved by it, and wants to put this feeling into words, but it can't be put into words. That's what - the music has already supplied the meaning, and words will just be superfluous after that. But it's that kind of verbal meaning that can't be verbalized that I try to get at in poetry.

John Ashbery

The words 'alone,' 'lonely,' and 'loneliness' are three of the most powerful words in the English language. Those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.

Donald Miller

At the time of 'Words, Words, Words,' I'm a 19-year-old getting up feeling like he's entitled to do comedy and tell you what he thinks of the world, so that's inherently a little bit ridiculous.

Bo Burnham

Wordstruck is exactly what I was—and still am: crazy about the sound of words, the look of words, the taste of words, the feeling for words on the tongue and in the mind.

Robert MacNeil

I don't think the singers take it as seriously as we used to. The words, the meaning, the phrasing, the feeling of the song. They see the words, they know the tune and they just sing it.

Vera Lynn

It doesn't matter if you and everyone else in the room are thinking it. You don't say the words. Words are weapons. They blast big bloody holes in the world. And words are bricks. Say something out loud and it starts turning solid. Say it loud enough and it becomes a wall you can't get through.