* 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.
...The lyrics were fantastic, even though we didn't know what he was saying half the time.
I was never really wanted. The only reason I am a star is because of my repression. Nothing would have driven me through all that if I was "normal."
We're more popular than Jesus now. I don't know which will go first--rock and roll or Christianity.
Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed to sleep. It's always in the middle of the bloody night, or when you're half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is.
When I was a young man, I thought something was going to happen to me. I thought I was going to be famous. I didn't know what it was, specifically. I certainly didn't think it was going to be [for] murdering John Lennon.
A letter sent to the parole board on behalf of Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, had again asked that parole be denied (for Mark David Chapman, )
If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.
My early choice in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference.
I received a letter from a professor at Harvard, Timothy Leary, inviting me to participate in a mind-expansion program using something I'd never heard of--LSD. I was intrigued. If I hadn't been in the middle of a hit play, I would have joined his experiment. I wanted to expand my mind.
The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
Music is the sole art which evokes nostalgia for the future.
Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success.
I adore art . . . when I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes, and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear.
Verdi... has bursts of marvellous passion. His passion is brutal, it is true, but it is better to be impassioned in this way than not at all. His music at times exasperates, but it never bores.
I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you're doing--even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.
It takes twenty years to make an overnight success.
In America, the only truly popular art form is the movies. Most people consider painting a hobby and literature, schoolwork.
Discoveries are often made by not following instructions, by going off the main road, by trying the untried.
Life begins as a quest of the child for the man and ends as a journey by the man to rediscover the child.
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.
Chiefly the mold of a man's fortune is in his own hands.
It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.
My dear young sir. As I am the offended party, the choice of weapons is mine. We shall fight with orthography. You are already dead!
I tell you this in confidence, you know; and not from discouragement, but so that you may understand that for me life is not a bed of roses, but something prosaic like a Monday morning.
Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.
I don't like authority. At least I don't like other people's authority.
Let all seen enjoyments lead to the unseen fountain from whence they flow.
Personally, I'd be delighted to live in a country where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons.
Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious.
In Hell, if you're really bad, you must be fourteen forever, and be trapped in school, and never get to go home.