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 September 2007:

Music's golden tongue Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor.

If thine enemy wrong thee, buy each of his children a drum.
  • Chinese proverb
I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene.
  • Ray Charles (1930-2004)
You can knock me down, but you better have a big rock to keep me there.
  • Dottie West
I don't want to get rich, I just want to live good.
  • Patsy Cline (1932-1963)
Yesterday I worked in the yard at my farm up in the country. I hoed my tomatoes, my okra. I dug around my roses, set out some fig bushes, worked around my grape vines. I do that kind of stuff. That's my therapy.
  • Johnny Cash (1932-2003)
...there is no hip world, there is no straight world. [...] by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence.
  • Frank Zappa (1940 - 1993)
This music is forever for me. It's the stage thing, that rush moment that you live for. It never lasts, but that's what you live for.
  • Bruce Springsteen (1949- ) _Time Magazine_ [October 27, 1975]
I'm a study of a man in chaos in search of frenzy.
  • Oscar Levant, _Time Magazine_ May 5, 1958
[...] You lose your confidence. I've done that, but I've always fought my way back. I've just really bore down, and even if I have to write a few terrible songs, I eventually work my way back up to the mark.
  • Harlan Howard (1927-2002)
A lot of songs you write are just for exercise--just pencil sharpeners.
  • Harlan Howard (1927-2002)
I started high school in 1950. Cool was invented in this period. . . . You never let on what bothered you.
  • Jack Nicholson (1937- ) _Rolling stone_ [August 14, 1986]
A man there was, tho' some did count him mad, The more he cast away, the more he had.
  • John Bunyan (1628-1688) _The Pilgrim's Progress_ [1684], Part II
Immediate infinity, a meaningless expression for philosophy, is the reality, the very essence of music.
  • E. M. Cioran, All Gall is Divided: gnomes and apothegms
Some day they'll go down together They'll bury them side by side
To few it'll be grief-- To the law a relief-- But it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.
  • Bonnie Parker (1910-1934) _The Story of Bonnie and Clyde_ [1934]

 

 

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