Musician Quotes (page 8)
All those happy, pretty, successful people- he hated them because he knew they didn't really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in a way that made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren't people, he fumed, they're photographs.
Russell Banks
John: 'I think the music reflects the state that the society is in. It doesn't suggest the state. I think the poets and musicians and artists are of the age - not only do they lead the age on, but they also reflect that age. [...] Like The Beatles. We came out of Liverpool and we reflected our background and we reflected our thoughts in what we sang, and that's all people are doing.
John Lennon
Now that music is faithfully reproducible, musicians are not needed as once they were. And music itself has changed. Though small cadres of classicists keep the sacred and ineffable alive, they are under siege by coarse generations whose music is hardly as musical as a bus engine or a chain saw. Something must have occurred during their mothers' pregnancies. How else is it possible to explain that playing Bach keeps them away from public spaces the way iron spikes drive pigeons from cathedral...
Mark Helprin
You see, I think drugs have done some good things for us. I really do. And if you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor. Go home tonight. Take all your albums, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them. 'Cause you know what, the musicians that made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years were rrreal fucking high on drugs. The Beatles were so fucking high they let Ringo sing a few tunes.
Bill Hicks
I'm as big as snob as they come, but money is a terrible barometer of a person's worth. The standard I used is what a person is choosing to do with his life. So for me a struggling musician (someone dedicated to their craft, not some slacker) is much better than some lame investment banker. And the fact that she lied seemed like she was ashamed. She dismissed my anger as if I were overreacting.
Harvey Pekar
Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.
Arundhati Roy
A game master or teacher who was primarily concerned with being close enough to the "innermost meaning" would be a very bad teacher. To be candid, I myself, for example, have never in my life said a word to my pupils about the "meaning" of music; if there is one it does not need my explanations. On the other hand I have always made a great point of having my pupils count their eighths and sixteenths nicely. Whatever you become, teacher, scholar, or musician, have respect for the "meaning" but...
Herman Hesse
I watched her perform on the Grammys and she totally sucked. The song 'All I Want to Do is Have Some Fun' sucks and when she walked out of that place with all those Grammies I knew I was going to give mine away. I did. If they're giving them away for crap, I don't want one in my place. What an insult to real music and musicians everywhere.
Henry Rollins
Poets to ComePOETS to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me, and answer what I am for; But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known, Arouse! Arousefor you must justify meyou must answer. I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness. I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and then averts his...
Walt Whitman