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 2007:

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

Prostitute yourself. As far as I'm concerned, that's even braver than waiting for the public to catch on.
  • Gene Simmons, interview
When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano.
  • Bob Hope, on comedienne/concert pianist Phyllis Diller
Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords--philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.
  • Anna Brownell Jameson
Yet there is one thing the world with all its rottenness cannot take from us, and that is the deep and abiding joy and consolation perpetuate in great music. Here the spirit may find home and relief when all else fails.
  • Eric Fenby: Delius as I Knew Him.
At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive...
  • Eric Idle
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
  • Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) The Common Reader (1925) 'Modern Fiction'
Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstandings that can gather around a new name.
  • Rainer Maria Rilke, Gesammelte Werke
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
  • Pauline Kael, quoted in Newsweek, Dec. 24, 1973
A best moment in music? Sometimes when I'm playing my guitar, I get to a point where it gets very cold and icy inside me. It's very refreshing. Every breath is like you're at the North Pole. Your head starts to freeze. Your inhalations are big-more air than you ever thought there is starts pouring in. There's something magical about it. Sometimes when it happens, you wonder if you're gonna be okay. Can you handle it?
  • Neil Young, interview
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
The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.
  • Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890)
Smoking is one of the leading causes of all statistics.
  • Liza Minnelli
Thee too, old fiddle, oft thy strings Rejoice, or triumph, or complain,
A needful balm thy music brings, For weariness or pain.
  • Ben Preston, 'Poor Man's Riches',Dialect and other Poems (1881)
Bizarreness is the essence of the exotic. As modern entertainers inadvertantly struggle to make the bizarre become common place [...] is the very reason why most Americans are living, what in 1950, would have been called "Holywood Lives".
  • The Quote Robot
Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.
  • Henry Van Dyke, (1852 - 1933)
Whether I was in my body or out of my body as I wrote it I know not. God knows.
  • George Frederick Handel (1681 ? 1759) on the "Hallelujah Chorus" of his 'Messiah'
I used to be 'with it.' Then they changed what 'it' was. Now, whatever I'm 'with' isn't 'it,' and what's 'with it' seems weird and scary.
  • Abe Simpson ~dialouge "The Simpsons"
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
  • Mark Twain, Introductory Note to _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_
If Mr. Clemens (Mark Twain) cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had better stop writing for them.
  • Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888)
I am just going outside, and may be some time.
  • Lawrence Oates (1880 - 1912)
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