Advertise Here

Problem Solving | Idea Generation | Training and Education | News and Information
quote-amaze logo
Musicians

If you don’t run you rust.
Tom Petty


But it’s all right now, I’ve learned my lesson well
You see, you can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself
Rick Nelson


I don’t want audiences to feel a specific thing—I just want audiences to feel.
Paul Simon


I totally and completely admit, with no qualms at all, my egomania, my selfishness, coupled with a really magnificent voice.
Leontyne Price


Use your mentality
Wake up to reality.
Cole Porter


Music is playing inside my head
Over and over and over again
There’s no end
Carole King 76


But the Lord does his work in mysterious ways
And love makes peculiar demands
—The Preacher in The Church with the Styrofoam Steeple


Improvisation, it is a mystery. You can write a book about it, but by the end no one still knows what it is. When I improvise and I’m in good form, I’m like somebody half sleeping. I even forget that there are people in front of me. Great improvisers are like priests, they are thinking only of their God.
Stéphane Grappelli


I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain’t music. It’s close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.
Billie Holiday


Competitions are for horses, not artists.
Béla Bartók


All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song.
Louis Armstrong


To me the success of any truly great rock song is related to the fact that people who couldn’t communicate in normal ways can quite easily communicate through the mutual enjoyment of rock music.
Pete Townshend


I think the greatest performances always elude the camera, the tape recorder, the pen. They happen in the middle of the night when the musician plays for one special friend under the moonlight. They happen in the dress rehearsal just before the play opens.
Stephen Nachmanovitch


Money doesn’t talk, it screams.
Bob Dylan


Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.
Ella Fitzgerald


Top

Launch Pad

End

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
Joan Baez


God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
John Lennon


Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
Charlie Parker


A lot of people don’t have much food on their table
But they got a lot of forks ’n knives
And they gotta cut somethin’
Bob Dylan, "Talking New York"


Well, I never went to college and learned I couldn’t.
Duke Ellington, when asked how he could write so many different kinds of music


An accident is perhaps the only thing that really inspires us. A composer improvises aimlessly the way an animal grubs about. Both of them go grubbing about because they yield to a compulsion to seek things out.
Igor Stravinsky


The important thing is to feel your music, really feel it and believe it.
Ray Charles


I was never much for rules, anyway; otherwise I probably wouldn’t have invented anything or gone so far in music.
Les Paul SOURCE


I want to take people to another place in the shows. That’s when music really works for me... When I’m really connecting, I almost feel a continual state of arousal.
Sara McLachlan


Well, I fin’ly started thinkin’ straight
When I run outa things to investigate
Bob Dylan "Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues"


There’s only one woman I know who could never be a symphony conductor, and that’s the Venus de Milo.
Margaret Hillis


This land is your land
This land is my land
From California
To the New York Island
Woody Guthrie


There’s a bran’ new gimmick every day
Just t’ take somebody’s money away
Bob Dylan, "Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues"


Top

Launch Pad

End

Anything anarchistic like Napster is good—it makes artists ask why they are not in control of what they are doing.
—Dave Stewart

The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.
Tom Waits


Make your  money while you can, before you have to stop
For when you pull that dead man’s hand, your gamblin’ days are up
Bob Dylan, "Gambling Willie"

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
Charles Mingus


I have the same goal I’ve had ever since I was a girl. I want to rule the world.
Madonna


What we play is life.
Louis Armstrong


I can’t talk about my singing. I’m inside it. How can you describe something you’re inside of?
Janis Joplin


You can have an idea in your head, but if you can’t execute it, what’s the use?
Eddie Van Halen


She knows there’s no success like failure
And failure’s no success at all
Bob Dylan, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit"


Musical comedies aren’t written, they are re-written.
Stephen Sondheim


The most important thing to me as a songwriter is the breath. The most important thing I could ever say to somebody is, ’Sometimes I breathe you in.’
Tori Amos


I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to. 
Elvis Presley 


Top

Launch Pad

End

The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist; it is a gift we all share; to some degree or other all of us, all of you, are endowed with the powers of fantasy.
Leonard Bernstein


Elvis was sent by God to revive sex.
—Rev. Howard Finster


So you can have your beauty
It’s skin deep and it only lies
And you can have your youth
It’ll rot before your eyes
Bob Dylan, "Long Time Gone"


Help! I need somebody. Not just anybody.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney


Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.
Ludwig van Beethoven


I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.
Paul McCartney


I’ve gone to the guitar because I’ve had an idea, a line, or a riff. But I don’t do that when I start playing. I do something completely different that I had no idea I was going to do. Something inside that is an uncontrolled wish to express itself.
Eric Clapton


It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.
Dizzy Gillespie


It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
Joan Baez


There’s only two ways to sum up music: either it’s good or bad. If it’s good, you don’t mess about it. You enjoy it.
Louis Armstrong


A great song is more than just words and music. It’s like a thumb pressing against the pulse of living that relates a simple truth about a very complicated process.
Jimmy Buffet


I can’t read or write music, so sometimes, in trying to find things, I just stick my hand on the neck... some of my favorite things to play started as mistakes.
Stevie Ray Vaughan


Top

Launch Pad

End

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
Duke Ellington


"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke."
Bob Dylan, "All Along the Watchtower"


The notes I handle no better than many pianists, but the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides!
Arthur Schnabel


Do-be-do-be-do
Frank Sinatra


When you write a song that’s a chore to play, the performances never sound anything but strained.
Jerry Garcia


First, master your instrument. Then forget all that shit and play!
Charlie Parker


The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.
André Previn


R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Find out what it means to me
Aretha Franklin


A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D. Unfortunately, they don’t have a J.O.B.
Fats Domino


I saw losing my virginity as a career move.
Madonna


All the best songwriting I do is when my mind isn’t working at all. I like to watch baseball games with a guitar—you don’t use your mind at all.
Peter Buck


I would rather sing one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep.
—Cecelia Bartoli


The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
Bob Dylan, "Blowin’ in the Wind"


Top

Launch Pad

End

What I shit is better than anything you’ve ever thought!
Ludwig van Beethoven to Carl Maria von Weber


A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.
Bob Dylan


Those first five or six songs I wrote. I was just taking notes at a fantastic rock concert in my that was going on inside in my head. And once I had written the songs, I had to sing them.
Jim Morrison


Just give to me my gravestone
With it clearly carved upon
"I’s a long time a-comin’
An’ I’ll be a long time gone
Bob Dylan, "Long Time Gone"


Songs need to have a secret, cryptic, thematic thing about them. Otherwise they are just messy and all over the place.
Courtney Love


To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.
Les Paul SOURCE


Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one’s chosen form.
Stephen Nachmanovitch


Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn’t do nothing.
Duke Ellington


I’ve always had a certain song in my head, a certain chemistry of sounds.
Bjork


I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.
Miles Davis


A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules. Often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
Frank Zappa


I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
Igor Stravinsky


But if all of us folks that thinks alike
If we gave all we could give
We could make the great land of ours
A greater place to live
Bob Dylan, "The Death of Emmett Till"


Top

Launch Pad

End

I think pure rock and roll, good rock and roll, has the same thing that anything that’s pure has—and that’s honesty. Unthinking, primal, honesty.
Paul Stanley


I’ve dedicated my life to music so far. And every time I’ve let it slip and gotten somewhere else, it’s showed.
Neil Young


Climb every mountain
Ford every stream
Follow every rainbow
Till you find your dream
Rodgers and Hammerstein


I try to forget about the audience when I’m singing. I just think about the words and music.
Rod Stewart


My subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart


Basically, the whole world is doomed. So the way that I try to make it better... is by playing music that could be spiritually uplifting, that could put people in a positive state of mind, where they would have the energy to get up and do something, anything, that’s positive.
Flea


Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.
Bob Dylan, "All Along the Watchtower"


Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end
Igor Stravinsky


Music is just a means of creating a magical state.
Robert Fripp


To search for truth, one has to be drunk with imagination.
Leonard Bernstein


Baby, I’ll be your baby
If you’ll be a baby to me
Hank Williams Jr., "If You’ll Be a Baby To Me"


The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
Stephen Nachmanovitch


Top

Launch Pad

End

It’s like a shoe. You take a number seven shoe, you sure can’t wear a size four. You wear the one that fits. The blues fits me.
Muddy Waters


Sometimes on stage I’m like a mirror.
Alanis Morisette


Every song feels different.
Kurt Cobain


Under Szell they had to be the best. With me, they want to be the best.
Christoph von Dohnanyi


If you got a lot o’ money you can make yourself merry
If you only got a nickel, it’s the Staten Island Ferry
Bob Dylan, "Hard Times in New York Town"


Music is religion for me. There’ll be music in the hereafter, too.
Jimi Hendrix


I wish it would last forever, but as long as I am able to sit with a guitar on me lap, not even to sing to people but just to sing to myself, I’ll be all right.
Noel Gallagher


My music will go on forever. Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when me know me facts me can say facts. My music go on forever.
Bob Marley


To live outside the law you must be honest.
Bob Dylan, "Absolutely Sweet Marie"



Quote of the Moment
Create Your Own Quotation
Comments, corrections, and new quotations

 
go-create-dot-com logo
© Copyright 1998-2011 Peter Lloyd