Quotes by Composers - Page 14

I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.
Frank Zappa
It may not be nice to be good, 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
Anthony Burgess
I never liked hearing anyone say I was the new George Gershwin, because I knew I could have never even carried that man's music case. If George Gershwin hadn't died when he was thirty-nine years old, there is no knowing how much more great music he would have written.
Burt Bacharach
I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.
Max Reger
Your naked body should only belong to those who fall in love with your naked soul.
Charlie Chaplin
I envy people who drink - at least they know what to blame everything on.
Oscar Levant
Surrender to your fear so you may triumph over it.Choose me,open you soul to me, and embrace the Devouring.
Simon Holt
The truth will form and fall apart again.
Sarah Slean
If somebody tells you a rule, break it. That's the only thing to move things forward.
Hans Zimmer
The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to command her. It had been answered long, long ago, claimed Moss; man's very essence lay in the fact that he had elected to command. But to Stenham that seemed a shallow reply. To him wisdom consisted in the conscious and joyous obedience to natural laws, yet when he had said that to Moss, Moss had laughed pityingly. 'My dear man, wisdom is a primitive concept,' he had told him. 'What we want now is knowledge.' Only great disillusionment could make a man say such a thing, Stenham believed.
Paul Bowles
By means of industry and perseverance you will rise higher and higher.
Robert Schumann
Of course I do, Jack! You have to beLIEve me!
Raymond Benson
I can see lights in the distance trembling in the dark cloak of nightCandles and lanterns are dancing, dancing a waltz on All Souls Night.
Loreena McKennitt
When I work with experimental gadgets, like new variations on virtual reality, in a lab environment, I am always reminded of how small changes in the details of a digital design can have profound unforeseen effects on the experiences of the humans who are playing with it. The slightest change in something as seemingly trivial as the use of a button can sometimes completely alter behavior patterns.For instance, Stanford University researcher Jeremy Bailenson has demonstrated that changing the height of one's avatar in immersive virtual reality transforms self-esteem and social self-perception. Technologies are extensions of ourselves, and, like the avatars in Jeremy's lab, our identities can be shifted by the quirks of gadgets. It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering.
Jaron Lanier
Whoever blushes is already guilty true innocence is ashamed of nothing.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Making the simple complicated is commonplace making the complicated simple awesomely simple that's creativity.
Charles Mingus
The artistic temperament is too often only an alibi for lack of responsibility....
Edmund Crispin
Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.
Johann Sebastian Bach
He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.
Tom Waits
Our subject is, you see, impelled towards the good by, paradoxically, being impelled towards evil. The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress. To counter these the subject has to switch to a diametrically opposed attitude.
Anthony Burgess
There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
Oscar Levant
People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.
Jaron Lanier
Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold for in Algiers; another, by following this calculation, will find countries where a man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They assess men like herds of livestock. According to them, a man has no value to the State apart from what he consumes in it. Thus one Sybarite would have been worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians. Would someone therefore hazard a guess which of these two republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was overthrown by a handful of peasants and which one made Asia tremble?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.
György Ligeti
Interviewer: 'So Frank, you have long hair. Does that make you a woman?'Frank Zappa: 'You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?
Frank Zappa
In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.
Robert Fripp
John Brown's body lies a mould'ring in the grave His soul goes marching on.
Thomas Brigham Bishop
The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like.
Frank Zappa
They lurk in the cold and dark.Hungry and,wicked,they wait for their one chance to devour the weak on Sorry Night.Then the vours feast on a banquet of fear.Your fear.They steal your soul but your body remains.No one knows the difference.
Simon Holt
Death defines life. I'd rather stay undefined.
Lera Auerbach
With a heart filled with endless love for those who scorned me, I wandered far away. For many and many a year I sang songs. Whenever I tried to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love.
Franz Schubert
I judge the world by my own lightsand I come by my own hand.
Catherine Madsen
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
Jaron Lanier
If silence is to be broken, let it be with the majesty of music.
Mark Hewer
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
Duke Ellington
God's gift to his sorrowing creatures is a joy worthy of their destiny.
Johann Sebastian Bach
I hate books they teach us only to talk about what we do not know.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Mankind will begin to recover the moment we take art as seriously as physics, chemistry, or money.
Ernst Levy
I won't say that all senior citizens who can't master technology should be publicly flogged, but if we made an example of one or two, it might give the others incentive to try harder.
Chuck Lorre
Try to show grace, mercy and compassion, for one day you may need them.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
Frank Zappa
The Evil Enchanter appeared in a cloud of smoke. He waved his arms to fan away the fumes, and when he quit coughing, he said, "You've come to rescue no one. Now that you're here, you shall marry me." He waved his arms once, and a priest appeared in a cloud of smoke. After everyone quit coughing, he turned to the priest and said, "Marry me!"The priest said, "But I don't know you.""No, no, no!" said the Evil Enchanter. "Marry me to the princess!""Oh," said the priest. "That's different.
Michael Stearns
Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990S had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely.If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are.
Jaron Lanier
Strange how potent cheap music is.
Noël Coward
For the record, I do have genitals; and they are functional and aesthetically pleasing.
Chuck Lorre
Power and profit structures're out of cahoots with current technology. Aware of new inventions, corporations put them aside, waiting for competitive reasons until they're obliged to use new gimmicks.
John Cage
Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard Bernstein
He was a six and a half foot scowl.(on Rachmaninov)
Igor Stravinsky
To arms! to arms! ye brave! The avenging sword unsheathe March on! march on! all hearts resolved On victory or death!
Rouget de Lisle
They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.
Thelonious Monk
Asleep you can experience many hours whilst only a few waking moments have passed. This is why dreams are an ideal platform for training.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Our sins live with us for eternity, and that is perhaps the most frightening thing of all. - Sims
Simon Holt
If I'd known I was gonna live this long (100 years) I'd have taken better care of myself.
James Hubert Blake
A problem is a chance for you to do your best.
Duke Ellington
There was no trust anywhere in the world, O my brothers, the way I could see it.
Anthony Burgess
Happy am I, for every time I meditate on governments, I always find new reasons in my inquiries for loving my own country.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.
Igor Stravinsky
We are a race of artists. What are we doing about it?
Shirley Graham Du Bois
Cries for justice are often the bitter laments of the vengeful.
Wayne Gerard Trotman