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 March 2005:

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
  • Hunter S. Thompson
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.
  • Hunter S. Thompson
I expect my life to end pretty soon. You know, I'm 71 years old. I have great faith, though. I have unshakable faith.
  • Johnny Cash (1932-2003)
Rock 'n' roll is the most brutal, ugly, vicious form of expression--sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty . . . the martial music of every delinquent on the face of the earth.
  • Frank Sinatra (1915-1998)
I remember when I was very young, this is very serious, I read an article by Fats Domino which has really influenced me. He said, [You should never sing the lyrics out very clearly.]
  • Mick Jagger (1944- ) _Rolling Stone_ interview, 1969
Having played with other musicians, I don't even think The Beatles were that good.
  • George Harrison (1943-2001) (In Jonathon Green's _Book of Rock Quotes_ [1982])
My father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic.
  • Spike Milligan
I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.
  • Carpe Noctem, If You Can, _Credos and Curios_ (1962)
You don't take a photograph, you make it.
  • Ansel Adams (1902-1984) _Time_ [December 31, 1984]
I'm a musician at heart, I know I'm not really a singer. I couldn't compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it.
  • Nat King Cole (1919-1965) _The Music Lover's Quotation Book_ [2003]
When Michelangelo was an old man, he drew himself sitting in a child's pushcart.
  • Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) _The Quotable Artist_ [2002], (On Fame and Success)
Everybody's an artist. Everybody's God. It's just that they're inhibited. I believe in people so much that if the whole of civilization is burned so we don't have any memory of it, even then people will start to build their own art. It is a necessity--a function. We don't need history.
  • Yoko Ono (1933- ) (Interview with Abram Deswaan, Dutch TV, October 1968)
Be always restless, unsatisfied, unconforming. Whenever a habit becomes convenient, smash it! The greatest sin of all is satisfaction.
  • Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) _The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises_ [1927]
Someday, I'm gonna write a poem in a letter; Someday, I'm gonna get that faculty together.
  • David Bowie, "Blue Jean", 1984
Work is much more fun than fun.
  • Noel Coward
It is only well with me when I have a chisel in my hand.
  • Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)
An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.
  • Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)
...like swimming in a sea of gumdrops.
  • Arthur Miller, on working in Hollywood, TIME magazine, Feb. 21, 1949
By '72, pretty much everything had shifted to the songs. By '72, pretty much everything that could be done with the guitar had been done, with the exception of Eddie Van Halen, who had yet to come. What were you gonna do that Clapton, Beck, Page, and Hendrix hadn't done?
  • Miami Steve Van Zandt
[...T]he Grammys' low ratings belie the theory that piracy is killing the music industry. If everyone were simply pirating new music that they enjoyed, they'd still tune in to watch their favorite performers in a free network broadcast.
  • Ed Driscoll
Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense.
  • Josiah Wedgwood
Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing; he who has laid up no materials can produce no combinations.
  • Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) _Discourses on Art_ [1769-1790]
I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself.
  • George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) (Remarks to his servant, who found him alone and weeping, after Handel had completed the [Hallelujah Chorus] in Part II of _Messiah_.)
An extraordinary thing happened today.
  • THE DIARY OF A MADMAN, Nikolai Gogol, 1915, 1st line
An actor is an interpreter of other men's words, often a soul which wishes to reveal itself to the world but dare not, a craftsman, a bag of tricks, a vanity bag, a cool observer of mankind, a child, and at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerise a group of innocents.
  • Alec Guinness, _Blessings in Disguise_
[Rock 'n' roll is] just entertainment, and the kids who like to identify their youthful high spirits with a solid beat are thus possibly avoiding other pursuits that could be harmful to them.
  • Bill Haley (1925-1981) _Jabberrock_ [1997] (Rock 'n' Roll)
I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.
  • Arthur Miller, _Times_, 11 January 1989
Moths are attracted by the flames of personality. So are vampires. Artists should take note and beware.
  • Pursewarden according to Balthazar's notes, pg.288 _Balthazar : The Alexandria Quartet_ by Lawrence Durrell
A bell is no bell 'til you ring it -- A song is no song 'til you sing it -- And love in your heart wasn't put there to stay -- Love isn't love... 'Til you give it away.
  • Oscar Hammerstein, 2d
If they (politicians) weren't so f**king dangerous, it would be fun to laugh at them all the time, but sometimes you have to take into account how much damage they can do.
  • Frank Zappa, in an interview with Don Menn
To be too conscious is an illness, a real throughgoing illness.
  • Fyodor Dostoevski
His (James Joyce) prose works have an artistic intensity, a definitive beauty of surface and of form, which make him comparable to the great poets rather than to most of the great novelists.
  • Edmund Wilson: _Axel's Castle_
In the early morning of February 3, following a February 2nd performance at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, the small four-passenger Beechcraft Bonanza took off into a blinding snow storm and crashed into Albert Juhl's corn field several miles after takeoff at 1:05 a.m. The crash killed Holly, Valens, Richardson and pilot Roger Peterson. This event would become known as [The Day the Music Died].
  • http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/t/th/the_big_bopper.html
The image we [The Carpenters] have would be hard for Mickey Mouse to maintain.
  • Karen Carpenter (1950-1983) _The Music Lover's Quotation Book_ [2003]
First of all, you tell that goddamn queer we don't lend less than a million dollars. And even if he asked for a million, I wouldn't lend it to that f**king queer faggot.
  • Jimmy Hoffa (1913-1975) (International Brotherhood of Teamsters president; rejecting Liberace's request for a $500,000 loan)
Anyone who says rock 'n' roll is a passing fad or a flash-in-the-pan trend along the music road has rocks in the head.
  • Alan Freed (1922-1965) (In Raymond Obstfeld's _Jabberrock_ [1997]

 

 

 

 

quote