"There's that first moment, you know, the first flash, the um, the falling in love. And then, you gotta a lot of cook and see if you're still in love in the morning. Cuz it's a form of showing off, but it's also a form of sharing and you wanna say 'hey I caught this moment' with people, but it's a wonderful feeling. It's what anybody who writes a page or composes feels. If you didn't get those, you couldn't put up with the rest of it - the loneliness, the tediousness, the endless amount of work, the sweat."
"I love inventing. The hard part is the execution, obviously. But even that's fun, the working out. When I say fun, of course, I'm talking about the agonising fun. I'm not talking about pleasant fun."
"To make art sound effortless takes a lot of effort."
"Poetry seems to exist in terms of its conciseness - how much can be packed in. Lyric writing has to exist in time. The listener cannot do what the reader of poetry does - he cannot go in his own speed, he cannot go back on a sentence. Therefore it must be crystal clear as it goes on, that means you have to underwrite, you have to lay the sentences out so there's enough air for the ear to take them in. Also what has to be considered and not enough people who write dense lyric consider is there's a great deal going on besides lyric - there's music; there's costume; there's lighting. There's a lot of things to listen to and look at. And therefore the lyric must be, in that sense, simple. It can be complex thoughts, and it certainly can have resonance. But it has to be easy to follow. That's not true for poetry. Poetry need not, and probably often, should not be easy to follow.”
