Quotes on Instrument

I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn't lived long enough to experience. That's why I also believe in reincarnation, that we were put here with ideas to pass around.

I grew up in a family that believed that art should be used as an instrument for social change.

The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It's the only one that can start a war or say 'I love you.' And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them.

Polling is merely an instrument for gauging public opinion. When a president or any other leader pays attention to poll results, he is, in effect, paying attention to the views of the people. Any other interpretation is nonsense.

Your voice is not your instrument. Your voice is the character that you build, your innermost feelings, the things that you want to say, and your instrument is the vehicle that you use to carry the message.

Language is an inadequate form of communication. If you've picked up an instrument, it's because you don't feel you are communicating sufficiently.

A true musician, like Johnny Cash, should be able to walk into a room with nothing but an instrument and capture people's attention for two hours.

What really counts isn't whether your instrument is Baroque or modern: it's your mindset.

The most important thing is to make a percussive instrument a singing instrument. Teachers should stress this aspect in their instruction, but it seems that very few of them actually do.

The unique instrument to eradicate poverty and usher in prosperity is our youth.

The rhythm, the sounds, the tonality, the chord sequences, the individual effect of each instrument and each section of the band - I'm talking about a whole continent in my music.

It's a magical thing, the guitar. It allows you to be the whole band in one, to play rhythm and melody, sing over the top. And as an instrument for solos, you can bend notes, draw emotional content out of tiny movements, vibratos and tonal things which even a piano can't do.

I've never had a particular skill. I can't cook, dance, play an instrument, speak a foreign language. This used to worry me. I'd think, when I'm grown up, at 18, then I made it 21, it will be clear what role I should have in life. It never happened. I never signed on the dotted line as the sort of adult my father wanted.

When you play the 12-string guitar, you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune.

It requires an effort of logical acrobatics to believe that carnage of innocents is an instrument for freedom and elections are a symbol of deception and repression!

Did you know that the human voice is the only pure instrument? That it has notes no other instrument has? It's like being between the keys of a piano. The notes are there, you can sing them, but they can't be found on any instrument. That's like me. I live in between this. I live in both worlds, the black and white world.

I'm not a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes I feel that I have access to more ideas and information than my conscious mind could think up.

Few occupations pass the solitary hours more fruitfully than the playing of a musical instrument.

Representative democracy is a remarkably blunt instrument. Hundreds of issues are bundled together at every election, yet the vote tends to swing on just one or two of them.

Guitar was just a hobby, but it seemed to me that the instrument had possibilities, not least of which was that there was no one else playing it. I could be, as it were, the best boy in an all-girls school.

I always say that music is a small drop in the ocean of life. I was told a long time ago that your horn, or whatever instrument you play, is a means to be in the world.