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Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

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.

One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

People used to say poems were different to songs but I don't think they are.

It's weird to try to write lyrics for somebody else. They can't really get behind what you're saying or what you want them to say because they didn't experience it.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.