Acting is one element in a film. Directing is sort of the painter using all of those elements - sound and music and camera and putting it all together. And that can be fun and exciting. If you fail, it's incredibly upsetting - much more upsetting than when you're an actor. But when you succeed it's incredibly, incredibly exciting, so I like the risk of it all.
Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any citizen may assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols or bombs without incurring any penalties.
The experience awakened 'my tremendous musical ambition, which has never subsided to this day.
If you date a musician, you're never, ever really gonna be first either. You're gonna be right behind the music and maybe right close.
Music is important for one's health.
If a man tells me he likes Mozart, I know in advance that he is a bad musician.
When I got started in New York, if you were different from Miles & Dizzy it was very difficult.
I used to try to play like [Miles Davis], and Miles caught me copying him one night at Birdland. He said, 'Hey man, why don't you play some of your own stuff.' So, I finally did, because I had copied all his solos.
I love jazz music and sad music. I'm a sentimental guy. I'm a romantic guy.
The music is everything to me.
Classical musicians go to the conservatories, rock´n roll musicians go to the garages.
Music is the most physically inspiring of all the arts.
Music is always a commentary on society.
With few exceptions, every major pop singer in the US during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius. It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years.
Music is the child of prayer, the companion of religion.
I like the beauty of physics, nature is beautiful, it is my second soul to music.
The No. 1 thing the people I have spent time with in my life have done for fun is playing music.
You can't make a great musician or a great photographer if the magic isn't there.
Fundamentally I feel that there is as much difference between the stage and the films as between a piano and a violin. Normally you can't become a virtuoso in both.
Up-and-coming musicians can easily reach out and find a loving teacher, and that's definitely what happened to me.
The kind of music or the kind of arrangements that I do, the kind of musicians I choose, is just what I like to hear.
It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites-opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity-where energies flow smoothly in one direction-there will be much doing but no music.
I find it hard to work with other musicians because I know from experience that when they play, they play with their feeling, and that restricts me because I know I want to play in my own particular way.
I'm in a class by myself, along with people like Rod Stewart.
The world has lost a legend, and I have lost a friend. Johnny Cash was the rare soul who could be both.
