If you could literally 'rid' yourself of your problems by voicing them, I'd be all for it. But since that isn't so, why not reserve the spoken word for functional interactions and witticisms, if not declarations of love?
Amity Gaige
I call what I do 'modal structures.' Sometimes they're songs, sometimes they're longer, sometimes they're this mantra - I've never called myself a spoken word poet.
Anne Waldman
Orphans, dead parents, lonely children at Christmas, morose spoken word recordings, everything you love about the holidays. Move the turkey over so you can fit your head in the oven.
April Winchell
I don't really have a lot of hobbies. I listen to a lot of spoken word. I get books on tape.
Benny Green
I'm not going to do an album. There's enough horrible drag queens singing - especially when they do that spoken word over music, 'I'm fierce! I'm fierce!'
Bianca Del Rio
There was something about stand-up that music wouldn't give me, which was my love of the spoken word and the mercurial tendency of language to respond to what happens to you.
Bill Bailey
What I love is the comedy of the body. It's a little highfalutin', but you can even say pre-verbal comedy. People laugh differently at stuff that isn't brought to them via the spoken word. It's from a different place; it's a different quality of laughter.
Bill Irwin
The pictures are created by the listener, with a little help from the broadcaster. The pictures are perfect. If you're showing pictures, different things in that picture can distract from the spoken word.
Bob Edwards
Is it spoken word? Kinda, but that's a weird area. Is it comedy? Well, it's funny but no, it's not comedy.
Bruce McCulloch
I think for me, or for anyone who plays the quarterback position, it's almost an unspoken word when you think about leadership. Some guys can be a leader and be a running back or a lineman, or wide receiver, strong safety, or linebacker. But when you speak of quarterbacks, it's automatically a default that you're supposed to be a leader.
Cam Newton
Beta males and females historically fare poorly in anchor positions, and whoever has the dominate, or more alpha, personality will always win out in spoken word count simply because they don't wait for an opening.
Dana Loesch
I kind of got popular as a spoken word artist, and I ended up doing some ads and audio stuff for Nike and Sprite.
Dante Basco
A musical, in its true form, is where emotions reach a height where true spoken word cannot be enough, and you must sing. That's all it is. It's not posh; it's not out of your reach. It's the most visceral way to tell a story.
Donna Lynne Champlin
When people are speaking, they require our undivided attention. We focus on them; we listen very carefully. We listen to the spoken words and the unspoken messages. This means looking directly at the person, eyes connected; we forget we have a watch, just focusing for that moment on that person.
Frances Hesselbein
As a young woman, I experienced high school and heartbreak, and the music I started to write was a little bit more poetic, and more inspired by spoken word. The real raw emotional things that sit in the back of our minds, that you were afraid to say? That's how I started to write my music. And that's how 'H.E.R. Volume One' came about.
Gabriella Wilson
Everything starts with writing. I heard Nikki Giovanni and was blown away. I just thought 'wow'; she was writing from a black girl's perspective, and the imagery was so vivid that I started doing spoken word.
Jill Scott
Every spoken word arouses our self-will.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I wanted to do 'Manzanar' because I'd never done anything like it before. The spoken word there is between a drama and an essay, and I'd never worked in concert with an orchestra.
John Cho
Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.
John McWhorter
In my shows, I always try to incorporate music because it's the most natural way to set a tone. So if I want to do a show about depression, I use the opera. If I want to do a show about greed, I use spoken word. If I want to do a show about the injustice that's taking place in the world, I might play Sam Cooke.
Kerby Jean-Raymond
I don't think that the spoken words solve everything. Sometimes silence delivers truer feelings while the words can distort the meaning in some situations.
I greatly admire Justice Thomas. I think he is incredible, and he is very humble. He is rarely heard from. But his spoken word is powerful. He's an example of everything that is right about this country, just like with Ben Carson.
While the spoken word can travel faster, you can't take it home in your hand. Only the written word can be absorbed wholly at the convenience of the reader.
The unspoken word never does harm.
No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.
I've never really considered doing stand up, but I have done readings/spoken word things fairly often in which I'll just tell a bunch of stories and run off at the mouth. I'm a big tangent person.
When you have great performers and have set your movie in the right direction, it's a beautiful privilege to let the camera watch the action unfold without spoken words.
It is a coincidence that Mathangi is the Goddess of Music and the spoken word, which can be rap.
When the written and spoken word is censored, the urban landscape becomes a nation's only physical link to the past.
My band, Miles Long, is a jazz-funk spoken word band. There's jazz sensibilities, but I'm a bass player, so I'm very much into the head-bobbing vibe with sophisticated lyrics.
Since the beginning of establishment, poets and spoken word artists have always been both vocal supporters and critics of government. And in this age of Trump as President, alternative facts, falsehoods becoming truth at the send of a tweet, it's vital that spoken word poetry does its job helping to keep folks 'woke' and not numb or shut down.
If intelligence is the triumph of life, the spoken word is the marvellous means by which this intelligence is manifested.
Our true remembrance to President Kennedy is in our actions to honor the unspoken words and finish the unfinished work today and tomorrow and for as long as it takes.
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do.
I didn't start writing music until I was a sophomore in college. I would steal my roommate's guitar and sit on the front porch and kind of blend this weird spoken word and these little melodies over simple chords; that really started my whole journey as a musician.
I was an English major in college, so I really liked spoken word and poetry; it was what I did before I wrote music.
I was always into poetry and writing. So the urgency of spoken word is something that really has always appealed to me.
I'm a first-time father, and it was amazing to me to learn that my son could actually use sign language before the spoken word. I could see this intelligence in his eyes before he could speak: how he could understand what was going on around him and was frustrated by that.
Insight into character comes from listening intently to the spoken word. The physical person, their charisma, charm and dramatic flair is more often used to persuade audiences, as they use these stealth tools of disguise and deception.
The spoken word is man's physician in grief. For this alone has soothing charms for the soul.
When people see my show, they may not laugh out loud as they do with some of the classic comedians, but they do enjoy it. I regret that I called it comedy to begin with; I should have called it 'An Evening With' or put it down as spoken word. But the emphasis is always on funny stories.
Like it or not, liberal radio hosts fail miserably in the spoken word format.
To me, presentations are the most powerful device. You can't really name a movement that didn't start with the spoken word.
There is a lot of silence in me, and I feel that silence is often better than spoken words.
There are some people in this world who always turn and twist the spoken word out of proportion.
When I first knew that I wanted to rap I was seven years old and I lost the talent show. It was like spoken word or something. My mom made me do it. It was a Langston Hughes poem. The girl that came on after me, she wound up winning. She was a singer.
I won the speech competition in class, and I always say this was my first 'spoken word performance.' It was the first time I got on stage and recited something. I fell in love with the stage at the age of 12.
I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.
I always like spoken word records.
