Song Quotes

Don't go changing, to try and please me You never let me down before.

I would say the songs that have different lyrics. I always write the music first, and there's a couple of songs on this box set that have different lyrics from what ended up on the final recording.

I never stopped writing music, I just stopped writing songs. I've been writing music continually ever since the last album of original tunes, "River Of Dreams" in '93.

I look at some of the songs I wrote years ago and I can't believe I wrote such crap.

It was great fun to be able to work with so many different artists. And I'm paying a tribute to the Beatles. I've just recorded some of their songs.

I'd written songs with lots of people, from one spectrum to the other.

There's so many songs about heartbreak that exist this in the world, because music is somehow the perfect medium to express something like this.

In 2008, I was more just thinking about using the touchscreen for writing the songs. From there I started thinking about how I visualised music.

My most cryptic, strange songs might be my most personal, but that isn't how people are going to receive them, because they don't know the code.

I can remember back as far as age 8, performing with the Boston Folk Song Society. It was a Woody Guthrie song.

The judges say, make it your own, so I just remixed a song if I felt like the piece needed it

I picked and co-wrote the songs that if I was a guy who would be spending my hard-earned money buying an album I would want to hear.

I started writing songs after I heard Hank Williams.

"Like a Rolling Stone" [of Bob Dylan] is a kiss-off song like none before or since.

The highlight of my career? That's easy, Elvis recording one of my songs.

If you don't have to write songs, why write them? I've got enough where I don't really feel the urge to write anything additional.

I don't write the songs; I just write 'em down.

A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true. They're like strange countries that you have to enter.

If I made records for my own pleasure, I would only record Charley Patton songs.

You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

And I'll know my song well before I start singing

Lay down the song you strum, And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings No voice can hope to hum.

"Tangled Up in Blue," shifts perspective several times during the song to tell a "tangled" version of [Bob] Dylan's marriage and dissolution.

[Bob] Dylan's broken-heart songs are so much better. Like "Simple Twist of Fate".

In the meantime [1965-67], [Bob] Dylan was again writing some of the best love songs in the genre, like "Visions of Johanna," "Just Like a Woman," and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands."

My favorite Dylan song? I think it's 'Just Like a Woman.' It always makes me cry.

I'm always writing new songs and doing them live, and I may do it for a week or two, and then never do it again.

I really like the thing I did with Martina McBride. I had that song sitting around for a long time.

I have not made many conscious efforts to "re-imagine" songs. I just let them happen the way they're going to happen.

Inviting audiences to open up and hear things differently is an important part of what I do. But I still love to sing songs with words, too.

It's not that I don't love the song. My songs are like my children: some you want around and some you want to send off to college as soon as possible.

If you can take it to the next level and really tell an interesting story in a unique and fresh way, then I feel like that's a great song.

I was writing songs as a kid about leprechauns and Catwoman and teapots - whatever it is that little girls wanna sing about.

Finding great songs is the hard part of my gig - it's not as hard as songwriting, that's much more daunting - but I love playing other people's music.

Pat Benatar might need a rock band, but I can just sit with a blues guitar for an hour and a half and do folk songs and great contemporary ballads, and not many people can pull that off.

When I was five years old, me and my cousin got into a fistfight because when "That's the Way (I Like It)" came on the radio, he said, "That's my song," and I said, "No, that's my song."

Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you're not writing a song, it's like that.

I thought there were too many songs about people's personal lives.

In writing the autobiography, I can really chuckle when I look at the songs. I was acting out the part. I saw myself as a victim.

Sometimes, I do have something to say, so I'll sit there and I'll write a song to someone - and then I just throw it away because it makes me cringe.

I've always said I write albums; I don't write random songs and then sort them out.

The Motion Picture Association of America wipes the sweat off its brow and sings the PG-13 song.

Pop is an easy way for evil business people to make a lot of money. But I find myself humming a Christina Aguilera song every once in a while.

The only thing that would make her jealous would be if I led a parade riding a unicorn while ballerinas sang love songs.

Sing!" Grandpa Smedry yelled, his voice echoing down a hallway to the right."Sing!" If he breaks into song I think I might have to strangle myself... I thought, cringing.

I don't get into the favorite songs thing, because so many speak to different parts of my life, but the music in the '90s is just unbeatable.

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

You hear it in your brain. Whatever makes sense. Some songs work well as quartet songs, sometimes they don't.

I dont think you ever get tired of the well-written, well-crafted songs.

Im Sorry was one of the first songs to come out of Nashville using strings.