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 April 2006:

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. [...] One can either see or be seen.

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
  • Alfred Hitchcock
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
  • Hunter S. Thompson
He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
  • Leonardo da Vinci
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.
  • William Makepeace Thackeray
I've been poor and I've been rich, and rich is better.
  • Bessie Smith
All art is quite useless.
  • Oscar Wilde
Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us.
  • Roy Adzak, quoted in _Contemporary Artists_ [1977]
Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in a Scottish family with a passion for communication. His father Alexander Melville Bell was a well-known Scottish educator of Edinburgh. He developed a system called "visible speech". His mother Eliza Bell, daughter of a surgeon in the Royal Navy, was a portrait painter and accomplished musician.
  • worldofbiography.com/9022%2DGraham%20Bell/
Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them.
  • Alfred North Whitehead
You know, it seems the people are only impressed by three things - either you play fast, or you play high, or be the sound of the instrument itself. It's not what notes you play.
  • Chet Baker
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
  • Scott Raymond Adams
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
  • Bob Dylan
When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn't know how to play them when I was drunk.
  • Richard Burton
The label says one tablet every four hours but eventually you find you're taking four tablets every one hour.
  • Johnny Cash, in Steve Turner _The Man called Cash_ p.170
Bach's music almost persuades me to become a Christian.
  • Christopher Fry
The 3rd Lord Moynihan, who has died in Manila, aged 55, provided, through his character and career, ample ammunition for critics of the hereditary principle. His chief occupations were bongo-drummer, confidence trickster, brothel-keeper, drug-smuggler and police informer.
  • obituary written by Hugh Massingberd, Telegraph

 

 

 

 

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