"Performing is the easiest part of what I do, and songwriting is the hardest. ... 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. ... Because my musical training has been limited, I've never been restricted by what technical musicians might call a song. ... 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 don't like all of the music to be serious and deadly. ... Songs are life in 80 words or less. ... Songwritng is what I do. ... 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 it's saying. ... There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from." 

Neil Diamond