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The sounds and rhythms of words are really important to me.

I come from a jazzy, acoustic, folky background. Everything has to work with melodies; the words have to have meaning.

What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.

I always try to think of a vocabulary to match different musical situations.

Sound is the vocabulary of nature.

An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.

No matter how wonderful the story, it has to move on something, and that is language. The words that I use, the pace, the rhythm and cadences all need to be there. If they're not there, the story is like a boat that just sits there and doesn't move on the ocean.

I have songs that define characters from each film of mine. It can be a song from that particular film or something that just goes with the wavelength of the film; you listen to it, and it gives you that rhythm. I can't articulate how it helps, but it somehow gives you an understanding of the character.

That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.

I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.