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 October 2007:

...the image is one thing and the human being is another...it's very hard to live up to an image.

Be patient. Our Playwright may show in some fifth act what this wild Drama means.
  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) _The Play_
 The greatest artists have never been men of taste.
  • Jacques Barzun, (The New Yorker, Oct. 22, 2007)
 I wake up laughing every day. I get a kick out of life.
  • Bruce Willis (1955- ) _Reader's Digest_ [September 2007]
 "Who killed the pork chops?" "What price bananas?" "Are you my Angel?"
  • Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) _A Supermarket In California_ [1955]
 Since the "British invasion," nearly half a century ago, it has been socially acceptable, even fashionable, for intellectuals to pay attention primarily to commercial music...
  • Richard Taruskin, (The New Republic, Oct. 22, 2007)
 An angelic boyhood becomes a Satanic old age.
  • Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) _Familiar Colloquies_ [1516]
 I have come back from the dead. And a man who comes back from the dead has a story to tell.
  • Dave Roever (1946- ) _Welcome Home, Davey_ [1986], Chapter 1
 I know it's economics, but come on, folks, we all know that pot is America's number one cash crop.
  • Tommy Chong (1938- ) _The I Chong: Meditations From The Joint_ [2006], Chapter 16
 Circumstances made me the theatrical personality I am, which many people believe, is also a part of my personal life.
  • Bela Lugosi (1882-1956)
 I don't believe in gate-crashing. The people aren't up there when I'm sweating on a stage at a festival, breaking my ass. You can get the money, man. Sell your old lady, sell your dope. Look at me, man, I'm selling my heart.
  • Janis Joplin (1943-1970) _Newsweek_ [August 10, 1970]
 Janis felt like an old soul, a wisecracking grand- mother whom everybody loved to visit. When I was with her, I often felt like a part of her distant family, a young upstart relative who was still too full of her own sophistry to hear wisdom.
  • Grace Slick (1939- )
 Sure thing, man, I used to be a laboratory myself once.
  • Keith Richards, responding to a fan's request he autograph a school chemistry book.
 The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
  • Anna Quindlen
 How many ears must one man have - Before he can hear people cry?
  • Bob Dylan, 1962
 They work long hours in seedy and/or pretentious places for minimum money. They make sporadic recordings on unknown labels. They play for benefits but are refused loans at the bank. They pass their lives pumping up their egos. Some of them sink into sadness and bitterness and dissolution, but by and large they remain a cheerful, hardy, ingenious group who subsist by charitably keeping the music alive in Danville and Worcester and Ish Peming.
  • Whitney Balliett, Alec Wilder And His Friends, 1974
 I am a rock, I am an island.
  • Simon and Garfunkel > _I Am A Rock_ [1966]
Oh to be a stone! To feel no grief!
  • Euripides (c. 485-406 BC) _Heracles_, Line 1395
 I believe it's no good to talk about your songs; it's wrong. You should leave your songs alone and let them say what they say; let people take what they want from them.
  • Paul Simon (1941- ) _Jabberrock_ [1997]
 I feel very comfortable in my life. I'm one year away from 70 and I've had a good run.
  • Freddy Fender (1937-2006) (In an interview with the _Corpus Christi Caller-Times_ on August 2006 after his cancer was diagnosed as incurable.) _Los Angeles Times_ [October 15, 2006], "Obituaries: Freddy Fender, 69; Grammy Winner Grew Tex-Mex Appeal"
 When the shrivelled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
  • Virginia Woolf, Orlando

 

 

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