Songwriters From The United States

"It's easy to make people think you’re a gangster. It’s hard to convince the feds you’re not."

"Don't mess with my Phil."

"Tryna get some head from a mixed thing, big dreams showed up at the crib tryna bone And I ain't fuck yet 'cause her mama always home don’t let this little broad have herpes My nigga say she fast like Jackie Joyner-Kersee No rose petals on a bed in the ghettos Spiderman sheets, got her singing falsetto Grabbing titties in the club, pocket full of skittle Tryna get the kitty was like tryna solve a riddle My team major, we party like teenagers"

"I wanna fold clothes for you I wanna make you feel good Baby, I wanna do the right things they Feel so much better than the wrong things I said I wanna fold clothes for you There's no where I need to be, except right here with you Except right here with you Foldin' clothes, watching Netflix Help you relax, let you recline babe Then I should do it, cause Heaven only knows How much you have done that for me Now say, "I love you" it's the simple things"

"On the night I was born, the rain was pourin', God was cryin' Lightnin' struck, power outage, sparks was flyin' The real one's here, the young boy that walk with lions Around the outlines of chalk where the corpses lyin' Of course I'm tryin' to revive a sport that's dyin' But the guns and the drug bars that y'all rely on Got these nerds thinkin' that you niggas hard as I am But that just mean I ain't as comfortable as y'all with lyin'"

"Now there's no point in placing the blame And you should know I'd suffer the same"

"They call, they call me the fat man 'Cause I weight two hundred pounds All the girls they love me 'Cause I know my way around."

"You made me cry, when you said goodbye Ain't that a shame My tears fell like rain Ain't that a shame You're the one to blame"

"The eyes of love are watching you As you go from day to day The hands of love will catch you When you fall along the way My arms will hold and be with you Your whole life through 'Cause I am love And I'm in love with you."

"…with any story there are infinite ways to tell it, infinite character arcs to follow, when you drop the needle into the story, and when you pick the needle up."

"I pretty much live in the details of them, and they teach me while I’m writing. I don’t come to it thinking, “I want this character to serve this function in the play.” I have a very inside out approach as opposed to outside in…"

"…As I was visualizing the play, before I even started writing it, I just imagined three characters and their lives happening, their stories happening, on top of each other. It just visually felt like a fugue to me. If you read music, you can picture a Bach fugue. You have one line and the line can come back inverted and they’ll be playing on top of each other and I was like, that’s cool. That feels like something to me. I also was excited about combining this Latin world and this very western music classics world…"

"In Latino culture the idea of the border is very contemporary. It’s very much of our world, its politics are important to us. It’s also a part of our emotional relationship to the rest of our family in Puerto Rico, or wherever, and our own relationship to roots—the land of our roots—and where we are now…"

"These type of stories still go on. This is something that has to be said. It’s been done in many ways, but I think that theater being done live has a different impact. And when we come out of the show we stop and think–”What can I do in my society to make it better?”"

"There are so many “invisible” stories still, and one of the beauties of writing for the stage is making these so-called “invisible” stories seen and heard and felt. In terms of form, I think my work as a dramatist is becoming starker and leaner, rather than more baroque…"

"The vanishing middle-class, distinct rich/poor class divisions in the US and poverty continue to be issues that nag and tear at the social fabric but rarely are put front and centre in plays and works for live performance. I don’t think every play needs to address these topics, of course. I do think the daily lives of citizens—the sheer struggle to get by, make do, and the increased dependency on credit (and therefore, debt) are issues that affect everyone…"

"Plays are events in time and space. Plays are music. Word music. Visual music. I’ve always thought of plays as a form of composition—of text and the architecture of the experience of the full-length evening…"

"Being Ricky Martin back then and what I was feeling were not compatible...I was the sex symbol and I needed to dance and I needed to make girls crazy and I couldn't say that I was gay. It was a struggle."

"Superman has got nothing on me because my kids gave me that perspective...They don’t know what they did for me. Maybe they’ll find out now and will read about it when they are big. They’ll understand what they did for me. If they gave up their piggy bank, then I have to give mine."

"I won’t stop singing in Spanish...It’s my mother tongue. [It’s] important to let people know more about Latin culture and exchange a little bit — it’s what I’ve been doing for seven years, since I released my first solo album."

"...the most uncomfortable and saddest times of my life. I thought my emotions were evil because that’s what they told me. You’re not supposed to feel like this."

"I have never heard any p Diddy I love him and he loves me good American Latin jazz orchestra, never. You can know lots of music, but the clave is something you can’t learn anywhere. I go to universities all over the place for Latin jazz workshops and I see that. They don’t even know what a drum is."

"When things get solved in Cuba, the Cuban musicians will scare a lot of musicians from here. I always tell everybody: As soon as the Cubans come, a lot of people are going to have to go back to school all over again. In Cuba it’s different--there they really study music. If you are a musician in Cuba, that’s all you do. Brazilians also play a lot of jazz, but I think Cubans are the more advanced in both jazz technique and rhythm."

"I take all the negative things in my life and turn them into positive things."

"My kids now, they speak very little Spanish. That's because they go to school and they speak in English; my wife speaks English with them at the house. When I was growing up, my parents insisted that we speak and read Spanish. I'm so happy that they did that, because we developed their culture and their roots. I learned the cultures of the Latin people, which is very important, because in this country at the time that I was being brought up, there was nothing that they taught us about [Latin] culture. America-only history you learn..."

"The people love our Latin American music. Sometimes they don't understand our lyrics, but they love our rhythms, and that's what's important in Latin American music—in our music from the Caribbean or Brazil or wherever. The percussion is what really makes the music exciting."

""I'm a Democrat for the reinforcement of the Patriot Act. It's not strong enough. The A.C.L.U. can eat their heart out, but they are living in the 1970's. We should all have ID's. You betcha. What do you have to hide? Some friends of mine on the left side think I'm crazy"."

""I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel"."

"I'm really into this kid Brett Dermen, who I heard at the Hotel Cafe in Hollywood. He may get lumped in with the Jack Johnson feel-good/barefoot thing, but he's so much different than that. He's timeless — he's probably twenty-five, but he seems like he's twenty-five in 1972. He paints these gorgeous pictures, musically, where you think, "I want to hear his voice, I want to hear that guitar, and I want to hear those melodies." I put him on as a head clearer."

"I connected with the 'older' generation's music and I find that hard to be seen as extraordinary, because the music is so good!" he explains. I think what all those artists have in common is that their music Is timeless. A Neil Young song or a Bob Dyian song, whether or not they are singing it, can transiate to any generation.""

"Travis Barker has a creativity to create a signature sound and represent himself by specific beats that anyone might play and say, “That’s a Travis beat." And there's his overall creativity behind the kit, using different parts of drums the typical drummer wouldn’t think of incorporating with a style most would stay more straight forward on. His aesthetic is to create such a visual representation behind the kit as a drummer and bring the back of the stage to the front spotlight and to take it to new heights."

"Honestly, ever since I found this way of eating I have endless amounts of energy. I can go all day, and after it all I never find myself getting tired. No matter what kind of shows I have done, or workouts I do on top of it, I still have to force myself to sleep at night. … Right from the first time that I started to really eat vegan I could feel how much it was affecting me. John Salley … always told me how the players who ate that way outperformed the others. I started to see that results for myself as well."

"Over the last 24 hrs I have gone through lots of emotions. Scared, Anger, Heartache, Compassion and many others. I truely dont understand why a person would want to take the life of another. Something has changed in this country and in this world lately that is scary to see. This world is becoming the kind of place i am afraid to raise my children in. At the end of the day we arent Democrats or Republicans, Whites or Blacks, Men or Women. We are all humans and we are all Americans and its time to start acting like it and stand together as ONE! That is the only way we will ever get this Country to be better than it has ever been, but we have a long way to go and we have to start now. My heart aches for the Victims and their families of this Senseless act. I am so sorry for the hurt and pain everyone is feeling right now and there are no words i can say."

"Tonight has been beyond horrific. I still dont know what to say but wanted to let everyone know that Me and my Crew are safe. My Thoughts and prayers go out to everyone involved tonight. It hurts my heart that this would happen to anyone who was just coming out to enjoy what should have been a fun night."

"I had a lot of growing pains adjusting to the comic book writing format. The whole writing process just didn’t make sense to me. I had to somehow construct each panel just by describing it? But how many panels to a page? How much dialogue should be in each panel? How much time should pass between each panel? All these sorts of things were mind-boggling to me. By the end of writing the script, I sort of figured out some of my mistakes."

"I think whenever you write something you want people to like it. The best way to do that, usually, is to write what you think is good. That’s basically what everyone tries to do… just to write what they think is good. Part of that is staying true to the characters and the world (which makes it a kids show by it’s design)... and part of that is introducing deeper concepts that we, as writers, are curious about exploring (which makes it more interesting for adults)."

"I have an inner gage when I feel it’s too much, then I just don’t do a particular film. I’m lucky that I get more offers than I can possibly take. But I always want the phone to be ringing, because I want to do this for the rest of my life. I don’t plan on slowing down, but I certainly have to say “no” more and more. I consider myself very lucky to make a living at this. It’s almost bizarre for any musician to turn down work as much as they to have to keep themselves sane. I know what my limit is. And I keep myself at that limit."

"My background in music came from me playing drums and piano as a young child. My grandmother was a pianist and I was influenced by her and my parents were playing rock records which influenced my drumming. I was a fan of film scores, rock, classical, jazz, and hip-hop in my early years and tried to learn as much about each of those genres as possible. I began writing music in a serious way in my teen years while I was playing in various bands and orchestras."

"I just felt like God picked me up in his arms [and said], 'Johnnie Ray, I love you', and kissed me. I'm very humble and grateful for this elevation to the big time. But we all have to come down, and it won't leave me with a complex if I do. I know this thing might go over like a lead balloon, but I can always go back to that movie extra deal."

"It's not a handicap, because when you go to bed, I take [the hearing aid] off, and the phones ring, the maids vacuum, people knock on doors, and I don't hear any of that."

"I was walking down by the river. I lay down under a tree. I was broke. I felt pretty low. Then I looked up at the sky—all blue except for one little, white, fleecy cloud. The words came to me for the song—quicker than it's taking me to tell it to you. I got up—and I had new hope. That was the turning point in my life."

"Americans are the most over-entertained people on the face of the earth."

"I've got no talent. Still sing flat as a table. I'm a sort of human spaniel. People come to see what I'm like. I make them feel, I exhaust them, I destroy them."

"Don't call it a comeback I've been here for years."

"Apart from Dr. Dre’s countless collaborative works, his own records throughout the ‘90s solidified him as one of the rap genre’s single most important and influential artists."

"You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge."

"Took a walk and passed your house late last night, All the shades were pulled and drawn way down tight. From within, the dim light cast two silhouettes on the shade."

"I thought that I was dreamin' when you said you love me."

"The blinds wide open so he can See you in the dark when you're sleepin' Naked body fresh out the shower You touch yourself after hours."

"There's just some magic in truth and honesty and openness."