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 January 2008:

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks.

Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then--I forget.
  • Carl Sandburg
 I went to Haight Ashbury expecting it to be this brilliant place and it was full of horrible spotty drop-out kids on drugs. It certainly showed me what was really happening in the drug cult. It wasn't what I thought of all these groovy people having spiritual awakenings and being artistic. [...] So at that point I stopped taking it, the dreaded lysergic.
  • George Harrison, in _Beatles Anthology_
 The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
  • Michelangelo, (1475 - 1564)
 Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease.
  • Oscar Wilde
 I have been the creative literary mind of the century.
  • Gertrude Stein
 Art counts for nothing, you prefer the snippet.
  • Martial, Epigrams, 10:59, trans. James Michie
 They are complicated songs to play. There are lots of different parts -- you have to get from one to another. There are guitar turns in the middle. To get them all sounding right, you've got to be on your toes through everything. A Zeppelin show is not something you can sleepwalk through.
  • bassist John Paul Jones, Rolling Stone magazine, Jan.9 2008
 Art can only be truly Art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.
  • Margaret Sarah Fuller
 "Is it true that you smoke eight to ten cigars a day?" "That's true." "Is it true that you drink five martinis a day?" "That's true." "Is it true that you still surround yourself with beautiful young women?" "That's true." "What does your doctor say about all of this?" "My doctor is dead."
  • George Burns
 Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding, he sings.
  • Ed Gardner
 Worship your heroes from afar; contact withers them.
  • Madame Necker, (1766 - 1841)
 You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like Finnegan's Wake and Picasso.
  • Philip Larkin (1922 -1985)

 

 

 

 

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