Top 84 Lyricist Quotes & Sayings

Prabhu Deva has written the opening lines for a couple of songs in 'Vedi.' He's a great lyricist too and not many people know that.

I'm not a fast, stream-of-consciousness lyricist at all - I know some guys who are, and if there is one skill I wish I had, it's that.

Leonard Cohen is probably the greatest lyricist for music that's ever lived, you know?

Courtney Love's name should be right next to Bob Dylan when they say best lyricist of all time.

Kendrick Lamar is not a whack rapper, not at all. Do I think he's a super-mega-lyricist? Not really.

I'm actually a true lyricist.

Manoj Muntashir is a fantastic lyricist of this generation and he has penned my indie number 'Ae Mere Dil' very nicely.

[Jeffrey Lewis is] The best lyricist working in the US today.

I feel like I want to write some songs and I don't know how to go about doing it. Usually it's the lyrics that are a problem, and I think I am not really cut out to be a lyricist.

Sean was a lot shyer lyrically in his solo career. I think because his father was such a great lyricist it was hard to tackle that.

When I write the music for any of my songs, I write as a composer-lyricist in my head.

I dont want to work on a musical if Im not the lyricist.

I love all kinds of music. Everybody knows that Nas is my favorite lyricist in the universe. I'd love to collaborate with him on something.

I don't like to toot my own horn, but 'toot-toot.' I'm a lyricist f'real.

I don't consider myself just a rapper or just a singer. I'm a music producer, lyricist. I'm a poet as well, and acting is also a part of big entertainment.

I make a timeless music. I think I've made my mark as a lyricist and as an innovator and as a tastemaker.

Howard Ashman was an amazing lyricist and an amazing artist.

I have a fondness for words. On that note, I don't consider my lyrics to be all that great. I like to call myself a supplier of words rather than a lyricist.

Every revolutionary poet or lyricist has been criticised for something. If you come up with something new, there will always be people who will object to it.

I think Damian Lillard is the best lyricist to be in the NBA or play basketball.

I just think it was because I was known as a lyricist that's what people only wanted to hear that from me. If you're an artist you have to expand, you have to grow.

The greatest romance in the life of a lyricist is when the right word meets the right note; often, however, a Park Avenue phrase elopes with a Bleecker Street chord, resulting in a shotgun wedding and a quickie divorce.

The fact that I'm a performer helps me enormously as a lyricist.

It was very difficult for me to be the only lyricist in the band.

As a lyricist, I'm really trying to raise my level of quality.

I think I'm a good lyricist.

I feel like I really tapped into a pretty honest emotional place for myself as a lyricist. There's a broad spectrum of emotions.

What is so beautiful about a composer and a lyricist is that their job is to push a story along and not halt it.

I think, with music, I'm a lyricist who talks about real life things.

I like songs to mean something as well as sound good, and Paul Simon is a maestro. While Art Garfunkel was a voice and moved on to other things Simon remained the genius lyricist and composer.

We all try to increase our length of life, but we all have to pass. It's highly interesting as a lyricist.

I'm certainly not a lyricist first. I prefer doing it intuitively and not really thinking about it so much.

As much as I try to grow as a lyricist, I tend to laugh at even calling myself that, because I think that my actual talents lie more in arrangements than they do words.

It is a very serious consideration for a lyricist to step in there and suggest the meaning to a song. The music is speaking for itself.

You have to write some poetry, first of all, to decide if you can become a lyricist. I was born in a family of poets.

I love a good lyricist - always have. The thing that inspired me most was the different performers, like Tina Turner, James Brown, Michael Jackson, Madonna, even Janet Jackson.

In the 1990s music was a beautiful collaborative process between the composer, lyricist and director. They would exchange ideas and magic used to happen.

One of the key emotions a lot of people seem to be feeling is disillusionment, and what I try to do as a lyricist is touch on these emotions.

I think I'm alright as a lyricist, you know? But then what will happen every couple of months or so is that I'll hear a song I've never heard before and feel I've gone right back to square one.

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.

I listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell in high school. She was sort of an inspiration to me. I think she's a great lyricist, and she makes interesting choices.

Alan Jay Lerner needed a hit. The Broadway lyricist and librettist was a decade removed from his greatest successes when his partnership with composer Frederick Loewe produced something approaching unholy alchemy.

I don't sing melodically. Rhyme pattern is how I sing. I also write like a lyricist or an MC because that's what I was before I was a singer. I just took those elements and put them into music.

I don't want to work on a musical if I'm not the lyricist.

I'm not tryin' to come off as the best lyricist.

I've never considered myself a lyricist, but I have stuff to say.

Glenn Slater is my lyricist who, of the new young lyricists coming along, is the most exciting, I think.

I still recall how nervous I was when I went for the recording of 'Guzarish'... When I reached the studio, all of them were there - Rahman, Aamir Khan, lyricist Prasoon Joshi and director A.R. Murugadoss.

To me hip-hop is a culture and I became an MC to be recognized as a dope lyricist. That's what I wanted to be recognized as. So when I'm writing rhymes I always take it very seriously.

A lot of the great songwriters in history have been collaborators, with a separate lyricist.

Nothing against Nicki Minaj - I think she's a dope lyricist, and her body is perfect, along with a dope personality. But I'm more into a woman who's not so much into the spotlight.

With a musical, you kind of have to do a mind-meld with the book-writer, the lyricist, the composer, the director - sometimes the producer. I think that's a reason why musicals are the hardest form.

I am merely an amateur; being referred as a lyricist is a far fetched dream for me, and I feel I don't entirely deserve it yet.

You could be the best lyricist or rapper or songwriter, if you ain't mentally prepared to put in the work, it's a waste of time.

One thing a lyricist must learn is not to fall in love with his own lines. Once you learn that, you can walk away from the lyric and look at it with a reasonable degree of objectivity.

I feel like a lyricist is somebody that writes their own lyrics. Now songwriters and lyricists are two totally different things. You can't really be a lyricist if you didn't write your lyrics. There's no passion, there's nothing in it coming from you. It's somebody else's feelings and you just taking it and running with it.

Rakim is a great lyricist. To me, it was always beautiful to be compared to him.

I was an underground rapper and only 16 years old, a freshman at high school. Bang thought I had potential as a rapper and lyricist, and we went from there. Then Suga joined us.

I don't think I'm the best lyricist; it's hard for me to express feelings through words.

Sammy Davis, Andy Williams, Tony Bennett... their records sell in the millions; when I do it, it just trickles. But for the composer and lyricist, there's a tidy bit to be made that way, too, so I don't really mind.