“It's a marvelous feeling when someone says ''I want to do this song of yours'' because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.”
“I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.”
“Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.”
“There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.”
“I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.”
“If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.”
“They said, ''You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, ''Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.''”
“Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.”
“Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.”
“Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.”
“Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.”
“The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.”
“We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.”
“There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, ''It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.''”
“Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.”
“I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.”
“Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.”
“I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.”
“I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.”
“I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.”
“Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.”
“There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.”
“For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.”
“I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.”
“We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.”
“Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.”
“Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.”
“Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.”
“It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of ''culture.''”
“The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.”