Explore Quotes by Elvis Costello

It's a petty thing, but I wouldn't join the Scouts when I was a kid, 'cause you had to swear allegiance to the queen. I'm just not a royalist. I think it's idiotic, a hereditary principle.

Songs are more powerful than books.

Sometimes I write notes that I have difficulty singing.

Smokey Robinson writes the heartfelt songs, whereas it was my job to write the songs about weakness and failure in love.

Really the only thing holding a lot of records together is the personality of the singer, and the will to write all of these different things.

People tend to repeat the same quotes at me that I said when I was 23. And of course, you say things then, and sometimes they're ill-advised.

Maybe I just never learned my harmony part, because what everybody says sounds odd to them sounds perfectly natural to me.

Living a very long time would be a very scary thing.

Life for me is about movement.

I've worked hard, every single day since I left school. I think I have a Protestant work ethic.

I've never felt British. I'm just not interested in national identity. I don't know why.

I've had an unusual life. A life far removed from most people's experience.

I've been lucky to listen to lots of different types of music.

I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.

I'm a working travelling musician, but just on a bigger scale...

I think when I was younger I was not very good at writing love songs that didn't have a twist.

I find it to be the ultimate backhanded compliment when you are compared against yourself.

Happiness isn't a fortune in a cookie. It's deeper, wider, funnier, and more transporting than that.

But there are things in Il Sogno that the methods of The Delivery Man could never achieve.

And I don't feel any form of music is beyond me in the sense of that I don't understand it or I don't have some love for some part of it.

Mention Hubert Sumlin, as well, because Hubert's a great man, and again, you know, I don't play the guitar very good, but when I'm playing this kind of music, I always have him in my mind. I wish I could play like Hubert.