Famous Quotes & Sayings

Karl Lagerfeld

Music gives color to the air of the moment.

Ouida

Music is not a science any more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds.

Oscar Peterson

Louie Bellson represents the epitome of musical talent. His ability to cover the whole musical spectrum from an elite percussionist to a very gifted composer and arranger never ceases to amaze me. I consider him one of the musical giants of our age.

Oscar Peterson

He's not a performer, he's not a composer, he's not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz.

Oscar Peterson

Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they're trying to say with jazz. You don't need any prologues, you just play. If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.

Oscar Peterson

I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.

Oscar Peterson

I'm a musician and, just as the critics are hard on me, I'm hard on the critics.

Oscar Peterson

The music field was the first to break down racial barriers, because in order to play together, you have to love the people you are playing with, and if you have any racial inhibitions, you wouldn't be able to do that.

Oscar Wilde

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Kanye West

Because when you keep on diminishing art and not respecting the craft and smacking people in their face after they deliver monumental feats of music, you're disrespectful to inspiration, and we as musicians have to inspire people who go to work every day, and they listen to that Beyonce album and they feel like it takes them to another place.

Kanye West

I use too much of my brain and need to let some of it rest.

Kanye West

I'm not a corny-ass booty freak! I'm the greatest musician of all-time.

Kanye West

I'm supposed to be a musical genius, but I can't work the car seat that well.

Kanye West

I'm really happy I'm me because if I wasn't I'd be scared. If you want that Number One spot you need to listen to my album and try to beat it.

Kanye West

I am not what I would consider truly a musician. I am an inventor. I am an innovator.

Kanye West

All this role model bullshit; you don't have any extra responsibilities because you made some good songs! Your only responsibility is to make good songs.

Julian Ovenden

It seems like pop singing has sort of influenced musical theatre in so many ways - you could argue good or bad, really - and musical theatre is written for that style so often, which is a completely different style.

Judy Collins

Most of what we take as being important is not material, whether it's music or feelings or love. They're things we can't really see or touch. They're not material, but they're vitally important to us.

Paul Klee

There is plenty of room left for exact experiment in art, and the gate has been opened for some time. What had been accomplished in music by the end of the eighteenth century has only begun in the fine arts. Mathematics and physics have given us a clue in the form of rules to be strictly observed or departed from, as the case may be. Here salutary discipline is come to grips first of all with the function of forms, and not with form as the final result … in this way we learn how to look beyond the surface and get to the root of things.

Paul Desmond

Our basic audience begins with creaking elderly types of twenty-three and above.

Paul Desmond

I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini.

Paul Desmond

I would like to thank my father who discouraged me from playing the violin at an early age.

Paul Desmond

I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.

Paul Desmond

I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast.

Oscar Hammerstein II

If you become a teacher, by your pupils you'll be taught.

Oscar Hammerstein II

The hills are alive with the sound of music, with songs they have sung for a thousand years.

Oscar Hammerstein II

You gotta have a dream. If you don't have a dream, how you gonna make a dream come true?

Paul McCartney

When you said you were a terrible singer, I thought you were being humble. But you weren't.

Paul McCartney

George Harrison and John Lennon were the ones most against touring ... I'd been trying to say ..Ah, tourings good and it keeps us sharp .. but finally I agreed with them

Paul McCartney

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.

Paul McCartney

When you were young, and your heart, was an open book. You used to say, live and let live.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Music is the universal language of mankind.

Henri Matisse

There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.