Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Madame de Stael

The memories which come to us through music are not accompanied by any regrets; for a moment music gives us back the pleasures it retraces, and we feel them again rather than recollect them.

Madame de Stael

All music, even if its occasion be a gay one, renders us pensive.

Madame de Stael

nothing recalls the past like music ...

Madame de Stael

Music revives the recollections it would appease.

Haruki Murakami

Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.

Hans Zimmer

I have all these computers and keyboards and synthesizers, and I rattle away. For instance, with The Lion King I wrote over four hours worth of tunes, and they were really pretty -but totally meaningless. So in the end I came up with material I liked. We worked on The Lion King for four years, but I wasn't toying until the last three-and-a-half weeks properly. On Crimson Tide, on the other hand, I just went in and within seconds I knew what I wanted.

Hans Zimmer

What's the point of getting up in the morning unless you're gonna have an adventure? As the moments of our life are ticking away you have to be aware that it needs to be an adventure

Harlan Howard

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Gustav Mahler

Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already.

Gustav Mahler

It is always the same with me; only when I experience something do I compose, and only when composing do I experience! After all, a musician's nature can hardly be expressed in words.

Gustav Mahler

What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

Gustav Mahler

A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.

Gordon Waller

It was a great time to be making music because everything else was changing.