Music, Art and Madness Quotations and Proverbs

* some views expressed in these quotations not neccesarily endorsed by the author of this file.
* for entertainment only - history is not an exact science - dates and quotes not guaranteed for accuracy.

Added for August 2004:

There is nothing to it,. You only have to hit the right notes at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it. Passersby see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way.
  • Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) _Artists in Quotation_ by La Cour 1989
I didn't have any inhibitions. I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and I thought, well, I can do this. And I liked doing it. It's a real buzz, even in front of twenty people, to make a complete fool of yourself.
  • Mick Jagger (1943- )
I'd rather be dead than singing 'Satisfaction' when I'm forty-five.
  • Mick Jagger (1943- )
For most people, the fantasy is driving around in a big car, having all the chicks you want and being able to pay for it. It always has been, still is, and always will be. And anyone who says it isn't is talking bullshit.
  • Mick Jagger (1943- )
No time to marry, no time to settle down; I'm a young woman, and I ain't done runnin' around.
  • Bessie Smith (1898-1937) _Young Woman's Blues_ [1927]
When you play the blues, (the whores) will call you sweet names and buy you drinks and give you tips.
  • Louis Armstrong (1901-1971)
I smoked (marijuana) a long time. And I found out something. First place, it's a thousand times better than whiskey. It's an assistant, a friend, a nice cheap drink if you want to call it that.
  • Louis Armstrong (1901-1971)
If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
  • Louis Armstrong (1901-1971)
It's ill-becoming for an old broad to sing about how bad she wants it. But occasionally we do.
  • Lena Calhoun Horne (1917- ) _Time_ [October 17, 1988]
Who are you running from, you crazy man? . . . Even gods have lived in the woods like me.
  • Virgil (70-19 BC) _Eclogues_ [43-37 BC], No. 2, Line 60
[T]hough they imposed silence on our tongues, they could not impose it on our pens, which usually reveal more freely than do tongues the secrets of the heart. . .
  • Cardenio, de Cerventes Saavedra's _Don Quixote of La Mancha_, 1605 Part I : Ch. XXIV
What is art? It is not just nature, it is nurtured nature. It is intelligence applied to what physical ability you have.
  • Rudolph Hametovich Nureyev
[N]othing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
  • Mary Shelly _Frankenstein (The Modern Prometheus) 1818 Vol.1
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.
  • Carl Sagan (1934-1996) _Cosmos_ [1980]
I have nothing to say - And I am saying it - And that is poetry.
  • John Cage (1912-1992) _Lecture on Nothing_ [1961]
The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart.
  • Helen Keller
All artists - I believe - need the reassurance of a sincere opinion. Respighi had the singular good fortune to have a wife who was also a highly intelligent adviser, a woman of rapid intuition who could be brutally frank.
  • Claudio Guastalla, his librettist _Lucrezia_
'If only this endless jumble of music in my brain would stop'
  • Ottorinio Respighi in the delerium of his final illness. (Respighi was not a great composer. He was prone to indolence and depression, yet some of his work is indispensible.)

 

 

 

 

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