Quotes on Music

Garage rock is music for older people with young souls and young people with old souls. It's a certain sensibility, and you may have it when you're 17 or when you're 67.

What I'm dealing with is so vast and great that it can't be called the truth. It's above the truth.

Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter -- to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.

It wasn't until I came to New York and started to see the African American community, but also the Ethiopian community here, and started to eat the food, started to understand the music. I said, you know, I got to go and understand the culture. So me and my sister went.

I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

People said, 'How could you walk away from music?' But being a dad - there's nothing that can touch that.

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

If you want to play something that you hear, you need to listen with your mind's eye. You've heard of the mind's eye, right? Your mind has an ear too. It's a kind of listening, but it's not using your ears to listen. It's listening with your inner ear, and that's what you want to translate onto the guitar.

You know, traditional country music is something that's going to be around forever... I'm not worried about it.

What have I got? No looks, no money, no education. Just talent.

I directed my music to the teen-agers. I was 30 years old when I did 'Maybellene.' My school days had long been over when I did 'School Day,' but I was thinking of them.

If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.

The music began, and it was one of those life-changing moments. I saw an artist, Janis Joplin. She was exhilarating. She was vibrating. And she was like no other artist that I had ever seen before... It struck me that hard. Maybe the word is epiphany, when you get that special sensation.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.

You don't get music in your daily life, do you? Even in a movie, it's unnatural to have music. I always feel it's unnatural. But I want to make it not unnatural, to construct reality in another sense.

In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel.

Honest songs aren`t written for money.

Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence.

Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever.

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.

You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.