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 2008:

I'd rather be a musician than a rock star.

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
  • Igor Stravinsky (1882 - 1971)
Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.
  • John Lennon (1940 – 1980)
I've never believed in God, but I believe in Picasso.
  • Diego Rivera (1886 - 1957)
Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.
  • Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) (1908 - 2001)
Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.
  • G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) "On the Classics," Selected Essays
I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.
  • Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970)
Boys, look like you're having fun, but don't have any. (To his band just before going on the air)
  • Lawrence Welk (1903 – 1992)
O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives.
  • Jim Morrison (1943 - 1971)
Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?
  • John Cusack
Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
  • Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941)
I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.
  • Andrew Wyeth (1917 - )
I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is the language I don't understand.
  • Sir Edward (Victor) Appleton (1892 - 1965)
The Mandolin is the bottom four strings of the guitar, backwards...so a person with dyslexia has no problem learning to play the Mandolin.
  • Steve Goodman
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence— whether much that is glorious— whether all that is profound— does not spring from disease of thought— from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
  • Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849)

 

 

 

 

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