Jimmy Webb Quotes

I like words. I like the way they clash around together and bang up against each other, especially in songs.

I rode all around Hollywood listening to Donna Summer, looking out the window - all by myself - just going, 'I'm number one!' It's a pretty extraordinary feeling.

When I started out, I was absolutely awful, I had no voice, I didn't have a lot of stage presence and most of the interpretive intensity that I brought to the experience was actually terror.

I've been fortunate that when Frank Sinatra was in concert, he would say, 'Here's a song by a wonderful young songwriter, Jimmy Webb,' and I'd be in the front row and stand up. That gets people talking about you.

A critic can call any poem 'doggerel.' That is no more than a slur. 'Doggerel' or 'maudlin' or 'sappy' or 'sentimental' is in the ear of the listener. By the by, 'sentimental' is okay as it is defined as 'marked or governed by feeling, sensibility, or emotional idealism.' It is 'sentimentality' that is to be avoided, like the fiddleback spider, being as it is 'the quality or state of being sentimental to excess or in affectation.' Again we are faced with a judgement call and must keep a sharp eye on our outpourings to insure they are not overly gooey.

The intellectual elite probably believe that most of the lyrics songwriters create are 'doggerel' of one kind or another--that is to say 'trivial"......the young songwriter has now been warned about the implacable nature of the enemy. Under a rather large umbrella, preferred twentieth-century taste in art of all kinds has been characterized by a kind of detachment, or sangfroid. It is simply not chic to be carried away in one's emotional reaction to a subject. All serious communication or complaint must be carefully wrapped in a protective coating of irony and/or satire.

It's very hard for me to think about my songs and attribute some significance to them.

We as songwriters are in the same position as a professional fisherman. Our fishing grounds are kind of fished out.

You reach a certain point in your life where they things you do and say do make a difference.

When we go somewhere in New York, I'm known as Mr. Savini.

America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace.

What has worked before is never as good as something that has never been tried before, even if it doesn't work.

The people who are making money are the ones who are writing and singing their own songs.

Songwriting is Hell on Earth. If it isn't, then you're doing it wrong.

As I've grown - dare I say it - older, I had hopes of indulging my dreams of being a sailor.

I think it's prima facie evidence for the existence of God because for me to grow up and actually end up working with Glen Campbell is almost unbelievable.