Musician Quotes - Page 53

The magic of playing has to do with how much everyone wants it to succeed. If you have five players in a situation where the music is being improvised and one is determined it is not going to succeed, it won't succeed even if one of the musicians takes control.

I didn't write any music at all, and then, I remember Jon Anderson being very insistent saying that there were two kinds of musicians: the ones who wrote music and the ones who didn't.

You can have all sorts of relationships, but there's something with musicians working together where you can have relationship that can just continue to grow in a beautiful way.

I'm 90% performer, 10% musician. I've always said that Gossip are a band I would go see, not a band I would listen to.

The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

I have seen so many bands and musicians fade away, especially the ones in my early days that treated me and my bands with contempt for no other reason than that they were headlining the show, not all though, with great exceptions such as Slade and Vinegar Joe.

You might have asked [about skill] of an artist or a musician or whatever... but with me it just happens.

William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn't quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician.

Laughing and crying are really similar - what happens to your body. It's a very similar process in your diaphragm. Like a musician, you have to do your scales once in a while and warm up your voice.

I'm in a position I never imagined I'd be in as a musician. Bob Dylan built an audience through recording and live shows. The opportunities for an artist today are totally different.

As a musician or a performer, you're meant to know what you're about, but it's ridiculous that someone 14 would have any idea of what they're about.

If I wasn't a musician... I think I'd just be endlessly traveling.

I'm not a good enough musician to like completely master something in a couple of days and turn it around.

My father was a psychiatrist and a social worker but he was a very talented painter and musician and writer on the side.

The vast majority of women musicians function under singular names like 'Cher' 'Madonna'. They have to get married almost immediately to preserve their honour.

I'm not a philosopher so why should I provide anyone with the answers? I'm just a musician, I don't have any solutions. All I'm doing is questioning the status quo, with every record I've made, to a certain extend.

Art that only comes from the head isn't any good. Watch any good musician and you'll see what I mean.

My family isn't posh; they're musicians.

The way so many musicians slavishly imitated Coltrane, that's the way it was with Charlie Parker - only even more so, if that can be imagined. Everyone that I knew changed totally. But they took the worst things of his playing-that harsh sound; it just didn't come off the way they did it. The way he did it was great, Their way wasn't good at all. I just would listen to 'em, say: 'That's a Bird imitator', and that would be it; I would never care to listen to them again.

I try not to become friends with musicians, but life happens and dinner happens and going out happens - it becomes interwoven in L.A.

I've done an incredible amount of painters. It's an area, for me, where there's more mystery left. I've photographed so many musicians, I've been in studios so often, I know the whole process. The mystery's gone from it. I think it's important to keep mystery into our lives. There's a longing connected with it.

Not only am I a musician, but I'm a businessman and a family man.

If a musician cares about what he or she is doing, and you show up and care, you can go some place. That will never change. There are a number of ways to approach this, and my favorite is the way we're doing it now - just talking.

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.

I know I’m an African-American, and I know I play the saxophone, but I’m not a jazz musician. I’m not a classical musician, either. My music is like my life: It’s in between these areas.