There are five things to write songs about: I'm leaving you. You're leaving me. I want you. You don't want me. I believe in something. Five subjects, and 12 notes. For all that, we musicians do pretty well.
Elvis CostelloRead
We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
Interpretation
Human creativity stems from our primal instincts.
In this quote, Elvis Costello suggests that at our core, humans are driven by basic animal instincts, and everything we create—like music, poetry, and literature—serves to articulate and justify these inherent urges. This perspective invites us to reconsider the depth of human expression as a reflection of our biological nature rather than an elevated or purely intellectual endeavor.
In practice
In a discussion about the roots of music and art, you might use this quote to highlight the primal influences behind creativity.
There are five things to write songs about: I'm leaving you. You're leaving me. I want you. You don't want me. I believe in something. Five subjects, and 12 notes. For all that, we musicians do pretty well.
It's the damage that we do and never know. It's the words that we don't say that scare me so.
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.
Happiness isn't a fortune in a cookie. It's deeper, wider, funnier, and more transporting than that.
I've had a lot of different experiences in music over the years.And not everything you do can satisfy everybody's idealised version of you.
I believe that music is connected by human passions and curiosities rather than by marketing strategies.
Maybe right and wrong did not move, but understanding of them did. The wrenching pain of walking the same path, even for a short space, tore away the willingness to judge.
What we experience is our own concept of things. That is why no two people see quite the same world, and why, in many cases, different people see such different worlds. To put it another way, we make our own world by the way in which we think; for we really do live in a world of our own thoughts.
I do worry about the expectation to look a certain way.
If in the least particular, one could derange the order of nature, who would accept the gift of life?
It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
Those to whom worshiping is a window, to open but also to shut, have not yet visited the house of their souls whose windows are open from dawn to dawn.
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