Neil Diamond Quotes

Actually, the title of the album came from the feeling that most of the songs projected and of course it is the title of the song Stones, but I felt that it also captured the feeling of the album and so I wanted to use it.

As I said before, stones to me is meant things that hurt people, things that cause pain and thats what this song is about.

Because my musical training has been limited, I've never been restricted by what technical musicians might call a song.

Brooklyn is not the easiest place to grow up in, although I wouldn't change that experience for anything.

Chelsea Morning is a great Joni Mitchell song and I guess I'm partial to her lyrics because they show me a slightly different perspective on life.

Fencing made me feel for the first time like a winner.

I Am... I Said is a very complicated song and its complicated probably because my feelings were very complicated when I wrote it.

I came back to performing with a different attitude about performing and myself. I wasn't expecting perfection any more, just hoping for an occasional inspiration.

I do have a large audience overseas, and I want to continue to be an international artist.

I don't like all of the music to be serious and deadly.

I guess I haven't gotten over being lost, a wandering gypsy.

I had always held everything in before.

I still need practice in enjoying the fruits of success.

I suppose that being moved to write a song is more applicable to me, I have to be moved, I have to have a reason to write a particular song.

I think probably Australians have just a little more taste than most people.

I think that if I have one hope, 1 ambition, 1 aspiration for the next 4 or 5 years it would be that I can improve as a writer and just be able to say more of what I want to say throught the music.

I try to keep some humor in it, and some lightness.

I was always interested in science, and pre-med was arespectable thing to do while I ursued my songwriting.

I was very young, but a great experience, very different from Brooklyn to say the least, we were in Cheyenne and just chock full of cowboys and great stuff that you only see on films.

I'm not really comfortable in any one spot.

I'm really interested in the work.

I've always accepted some kind of deity, especially as a songwriter.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

I've found for the last couple of years that the things that I can become most deeply involved with are songs that reflect my real feelings about things and so that what I've been writing about.

I've looked at photographs of myself during concerts and it sometimes looks as if I'm in a fencing move, with a guitar in my hands instead of a sword.

If it can affect me, if it has meaning to me, if I feel I can do it well, I will do it and record it and thats why I recorded these songs.

It wasn't an easy one, but I don't know if very many people do have easy lives.

Its really that simple, I just want to write music and record, if people still come to see me in performance, I'd like that to be special also.

Matter of fact, I dropped him a little note after I finished recording it with a copy of an acetate and he sent back that this was his favorite version of the song and I think its my favorite outside song on the album, its called I Think Its Going to Rain Today and it leaves me with goosebumps.

No, I majored in biology, in a pre-med program.

Of all the songs that I've written since I was 15 or 16, every song is different every song is special, it happens in a different way and I like that.

One of the thins I've been panting to do, in fact, is write some music for a fencing-ballet - the movements, music and staging would seem to go naturally together.

Performing is the easiest part of what I do, and songwriting is the hardest.

Song Sung Blue took a lot of compressing and refining, and it has one of my favorite lyrics.

Songs are life in 80 words or less.

Songs are so all-encompassing; they're the joys and sorrows and pacing of life.

Songwriting is different from music, although I don't deny now that it would be nice to have a little more background in music theory.

Songwriting is the only real discipline I've had in my whole life-thats why I hate it so much; I dont like imposing that kind of discipline on myself, but it has to be.

Songwritng is what I do.

Stones has meant to me the things that hurt people, things that cause people pain.

The lyrics aren't simple, either. They're extremely difficult because I'm trying to say complicated things in as few words as possible.

The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.

The next album may be called Sticks.

There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.

This is the title song to the album Stones and I guess if I had to sum up Stones I'd call it a desperate love song.

Very often the music comes first.

We moved around quite a bit, I went to a number of schools, its not the best kind of a life for a kid but I survived it somehow.

We stayed in Wyoming for about two years and that was a great experience.

Well, I Am... I Said was a very difficult song, very difficult because I really had to spend a lot of time thinking about what I was before the song was written.

Well, I loved singing in the chorus, and there was some connection for me between gospel and choral music.

Well, it would be foolish of me to assume that the only music that I can be moved by and affected by is my own music, there are many songs that I love and can touch me and move me and thats really the only yardstick I use to determine wether I'll record an outside song or not.

Well, this is about my 8th or 9th album, my 6th I think for UNI records.

Whatever success I've had so far has been assimilated into my body and mind.

When I first started, I worked with three chords in every bar, but I found that tied me down - I'm not a chord-change writer, I'm a songwriter.

When you're on a merry-go-round, you miss a lot of the scenery.

You like to think that it's something you created, but secretly you know that you had some kind of help, or somebody gave this to you.