Musician Quotes - Page 13

As a musician, I don't have one thing that's "my thing." I like to create, and have a lot of outlets for it. Dustin Hoffman is one of the guys that sets a model for me, because of how good he is at being such different characters. Every time you see DeNiro, he's pretty much DeNiro - great, but DeNiro. Hoffman is different every time, depending on his character. That's how I see myself as a performer.

Most customers, by the time the musicians reach the second set, are to some extent inebriated. They don't care what you play anyway.

I can show you that I have played with just about every jazz musician, every African musician, every blues musician. It's not like I'm cashing in on a false concept. This is what I do.

Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.

Musicians are the architects of heaven.

To be a musician, you have to be honest... to be honest... to be honest.

I like to make films, but the only reason I do is because I'm a very bad musician.

I'm a self-taught musician aside from what I've been able to pick up from other players.

Verbal communication about music is impossible except among musicians.

I never learned to verbalize an abstract musical concept. No thank you. The whole point of being a serious musician is to avoid verbalization whenever you can.

In theory, I'd like to work in a group. But the group I'd like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead.

I'm an engineer. I see myself as a toolmaker and the musicians are my customers... They use my tools.

A lot of times, jazz musicians try to educate people. What other genre does that?

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

I tried to make guitars that were close to what my heroes played. That's the way it's done. My experience is that you have to do it like a musician. You have to learn the language before you can learn to be a novelist.

A musician must lift up the souls of the listeners, and take them towards space.

Newspapers and magazines didn't want pictures of musicians behaving badly back then. Now, because of the Internet, that's all the media wants.

A musician knows hit material. It has to feel right. Everything has to feel in place. It fulfills you and it makes you feel good. You know it when you hear it.

When I was growing up and wanted to be a musician, the fantasy that I had of what the music industry was is so wrong.

I think the world is very much embracing this whole concept of musicians going out and playing their instruments and playing music for music as opposed to music that has something to do with some form of image or imagery.

Most musicians remain poor. But the music that they make, even if it does not bring them millions, gives millions of people happiness.

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

You know as I started as a shy young conductor, I always wanted to cooperate. To build up the musicians. To help them to be better than without a conductor. And sometimes young talented musicians have to be encouraged.

I just hope I'm remembered as a good blues musician.