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 October 2004:

Those who wish to sing always find a song.

This song is copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.
  • Woody Guthrie
I have never harbored any ill will toward people of God's great Earth anywhere - and wish the reverse was also true.
  • Yusuf Islam (1947- ) (f/n/a Cat Stevens_Los Angeles Times_ Sep.28, 2004)
Go ask Alice. I think she'll know.
  • Grace Slick (1939- ) _White Rabbit_ 1967
I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
  • Carl Sandburg
I'm scared to death of being cold stone sober.
  • Jerry Lee Lewis
I'm scared to death of audiences.
  • Johnny Mathis
Am I afraid of high notes? Of course I am afraid! What sane man is not?
  • Luciano Pavarotti
I've always been in love with my voice.
  • Roy Orbison
I shudder and I sigh to think that even Cicero and many-minded Homer were mad as the mists and snow.
  • W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.
  • Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964)
He demonstrates his willingness to boldly go where no man has gone before-including skating on ice so thin it's imaginary.
  • William Illsey Atkinson _Nanocosm_
Treat a person as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat him as he could be, and he will become what he should be.
  • Jarret Bell
A crash! A pause! Breaking all laws of music. A wail, a moan of a saxophone. A grunt, a groan of a mute trombone Is JAZZ! Minor chords. Condemned by lords. Of music, twangs soft and slow of a big banjo, a violin's shriek in a run unique Is JAZZ!
  • (Geisel) a verse surrounded by cartoons of musicians playing, in the _Dartmouth_ college newspaper, 1921 reprinted in Charles D. Cohen, _The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss, A Visual Biography of Theodor Seuss Geisel_, 2004
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
  • Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)_Murder in the Cathedral_ 1935
Dutch pictures are a representation of nature, just as it is seen in a camera obscura.
  • Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1759
I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion--against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others' ideas.
  • Johnny Cash (1932-2003)_Cash: The Autobiography_ 1998
He [Hitler] was also fond of Bruckner's symphonies.
  • Desmond Seward, Napoleon and Hitler: A Comparative Biography (1988)
To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must forget them.
  • From Dr. Mardy's
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
  • Walter Savage (?-1864)
I didn't have an affair with him--it's my only lasting regret in life.
  • Marianne Faithfull (1946- ) [on Jimi Hendrix]
They separated him from the amplifier and the guitar and it was like he was having an epileptic attack. I said, Do I have to go through these changes just to play my guitar? I'm just a kid! When they separated him, his eyes were red. . . He was gone.
  • Carlos Santana (1947- ) [Shapiro and Glebbeek's _Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy_ 1995
I saw [jazz guitarist Larry] Coryell once--he was one of the few people who ever got up and tried to cut Hendrix. He was leaping backwards and forwards, his fingers flying, and Hendrix--when it came to his solo--just went "BA-W-O-O-O-OWWWW" and it just erased the last ten minutes with one note. It was silly of Coryell to try. It was like walking into a blowtorch--the fool!
  • Robert Wyatt (Nicholson's _Jazz Rock: A History_ 1998)
Too many overdosed in too many ways: Mama Cass, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, al Wilson of Canned Heat, Brian Jones of the rolling Stones, Keith Moon of The Who, and Pigpen of the Grateful Dead. Those were only the most famous, for untold numbers had bad trips, or worse. Some still are scared. No alien to drugs, Neil Young warned his generation that (every junkie is like a setting sun.) Some never left the endless line of dope peddlers on Telegraph Avenue; others could never leave their own Haight-Ashburys.
  • Terry H. Anderson_The Movement and the Sixties_ 1995
My character passes from extreme joy to extreme melancholy.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) [In Lombroso's _The Man of Genius_ 1888]
They are extremely wretched paintings..putrid meat. There is no doubt that the great majority of the work called modern is the product of degenerates.
  • J.S. Donald, then director of the National Gallery of Victoria (Austria) on his successful ban of an exhibition of the works of Cezanne, Chagall, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso and others (1939)

 

 

 

 

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