* 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.
Handel is the greatest composer who ever lived. I would bare my head and kneel at his grave.
I didn't conceive of (Proud Mary) as a boat at all. I was thinking of a washerwoman or something. . . . It's completely different.
You -- Can dress in pink and blue just like a child -- And in a yellow taxi turn to me and smile.
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord -- But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
It would have been better if Glenn [Miller] had lived, and his music had died.
Sometimes I think I should go back to being a waitress; maybe I would enjoy life more. But if I led a perfectly existing life, where I didn't try the universe or dare anybody or take any risks, I would never have written all these songs!.
Before Muddy [Waters] died, he told me, "Don't let the blues die." We as blues players don't have the recognition that I hope we could get. But who am I? I can't do nothing about it. All we can do is just play.
For me, there still remains the cocaine bottle..
Rock won't eliminate your problems but it will let you sort of dance all over them.
I smash guitars because I like them.
Call, if you will, bad rhyming a disease, It gives men happiness, or leaves them ease.
While golfing with a number of celebrities one day, Davis was asked by a reporter, "What's your handicap?" He famously replied: "My handicap? Man, I am a one-eyed, black Jew! That's my handicap!".
I didn't want to find a horse's head in my bed.
Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.
I went straight from the Boy Scouts to rock 'n' roll. Fancy that!
When you believe in things, That you don't understand; Then you suffer, Superstition ain't the way.
I'm new with every song I sing. As we get older, we feel the need for newness. I'm going to be 45, but I'm still feeling new and amazed by the world I live in.
If you're writing songs, there are two things that you just don't write about: politics and religion. We write about both.
The system want pure love songs like ol' Frank Sinatra. They don't want not'ing wit' no protest. It makes too much trouble.
The only time a human being is free is when he or she makes a work of art.
I tried being a hippie for a year--it was a total loss. I was a lousy hippie.
I don't know what real childbirth is like, but writing songs seems as close as I'm going to come.
I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.
Secret gardens of the heart where the old stay young forever.
"You can do anything," sang Elvis to Pat Boone's white shoes, "but don't you step on my Blue Suede Shoes!"
The director is the most overrated artist in the world.
A poem should be wordless -- As the flight of birds
If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.
Plagiarize! Plagiarize! Plagiarize! Only be sure always to call it, please, "research".
[N]ature without exercise is a seed shut up in a pod, and art without practice is nothing.
It is not that the Mozart will make you permanently smarter, [but] it may be a warmup exercise for parts of the brain that perform high levels of abstract thinking.
Soul was always here, but the form of arrangement, what we called soul, changed with me, because I took jazz and gospel and made it funk.
You want to make some money? You've got to do your hair like mine.
My life has been a soap opera..
What do I really want as a woman? I want it all.
LSD? Nothing much happened, but I did get the distinct impression some birds were trying to communicate with me..
On my word of honor, I have never felt such self-satisfaction, such pride, such happiness, as in the knowledge that I have created a good thing.
Roaming through the jungle of "oohs" and "ahs," searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats..