Best 1187 quotes in «musician quotes» category

When a musician is conveying that fresh feeling, that's what appeals to me, even more so than the style.

When a lot of musicians change styles, their songwriting suffers because they want to be different.

When I auditioned for my high school band the band director was excited because my father was known to be a great musician. When he heard me, he said 'Are you sure you're Ellis's son?'

When I did the Abyssinian mass, I went through the whole history of the church music and the gospel music, even with the Anglo American hymns, the Afro American hymns, the spirituals and how it developed, up to Thomas Dorsey and the Dixie Hummingbirds, going through the history of the music, jazz musicians.

When I do the music, I make the musicians listen to what's happening in the film. That way they treat the dialogue as if it was a singer.

When I look at how fortunate I've been, being a musician... my response to being overpaid is that I should pay it back to my community in some way.

When I left Van Halen, I went in the studio and made a CD called Marching to Mars with all studio musicians. I did it immediately. With the disappointment riding on my shoulders of the breakup of the band.

When I like a musician I want to see a picture or a video of them.

When I hear a man discoursing of virtue, or of any sort of wisdom, who is a true man and worthy of his theme, I am delighted beyond measure: and I compare the man and his words, and note the harmony and correspondence of them. And such an one I deem to be the true musician, having in himself a fairer harmony than that of the lyre.

When I'm doing interviews, I'm doing interviews, and when I am writing, I'm writing. I sit there with a musician and I write. It's the same process since I started writing in my twenties. I like to come in and leave with a finished song.

When I look back on my life, I don't have regrets about what I didn't do. If I'd become a musician, it could have ruined my life.

When I'm working behind a camera, I feel like I'm trying to achieve something like a jazz musician does.

When I started making films I just decided "I'm the filmmaking equivalent of a garage band and I'll just make my garage band movies." But even the same musicians from garage bands would go to my movies and you could tell what they liked from the way that they dressed and they would be the first ones to walk out.

When I want 30 musicians in the orchestra, I get 30.

When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was to be a musician. I lost everything I had, but I just knew that someday I'd be able to tell the world to 'go big or go home.' The world needs to know.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a musician. I used to play the trumpet. I practiced all the time, but I got braces and I couldn't play it anymore, so I had all of this free time.

When I was a young musician, the only option available to pursue secondary education in music was to attend a classical conservatory.

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.

When I was recording from '70 to '82, I always played piano and laid the tracks down. But I used to talk to the other musicians while the track was playing.

When I was seven years old, I was leading a quartet and trio, and that really laid the groundwork for me as a musician.

When you find a waiter who is a waiter and not an actor, writer, musician or poet, you've found a jewel.

When kids look up to great scientists the way they do to great musicians and actors, civilization will jump to the next level

When the musician starts improvising, he never can go back to what he did last Sunday. That's what's frightening to a lot of people who can't let themselves go. But it's also very invigorating and very releasing because it opens you up to be yourself.

When I worked with General Electric, again this was soon after the Second World War, you know, I was keeping up with new developments and they showed me a milling machine and this thing worked by punch cards - that's where computers were at that time, and everybody was sort of sheepish about how well this thing worked because in those days machinists were treated as though they were great musicians because they were virtuosos on these machines.

When the musical keyboard was created in the 1970's, you had electronic geeks that had no background in music created these devises and gave them to musicians that had no background in electronics. The result was some of the wierd sounds that came out in the '70s.

When you are confronted with an opera, you have to keep an eye on everything: the musicians, the chorus, the ballet, the singers, the staging.

When you commit to being a musician, I don't think you're really sure or care about when you're going to pay the bills. I don't think you care about that as much as you care about playing music.

When you have the opportunity to make music with great musicians, take it. That's it. That's the only reason I need, really.

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

When you're a musician and you release an album, you have to accept the criticism - and I accept it! But it's something I'll never get used to.

When you're a touring musician, you're always turning over new rocks and there's always a certain level of tension in your life. The music business, and the travel that comes with it, is stressful, challenging, redundant, exhausting, exciting, and often very depressing. After all of these years, I'm still trying to cope with aspects of it.

When you really do find a new idea or you're in and it's all working, that's the gift. It's like a musician when they hit a riff, that's when you're like all right, it's mellow. You back off and just ride it.

When you're making your living as a writer or an artist or a musician, you kind of live in a trance. You're sort of in the day-to-day world, you're certainly there for your day-to-day relationships with people, and so on.

When you're a touring musician, you're always turning over new rocks and there's always a certain level of tension in your life.

When you're a musician and you go out onstage, and you're someone who loves attention, you are going to become a role model to some extent.

When you talk like an asshole and look like an asshole, you're an asshole

Why do you judge me as a musician, John? All I'm interested in is making money.

Whether it's an attorney or a bond trader or a journalist, or a musician or pastor, you want to do your best. You don't want to seek acclaim. You don't want to seek awards. You want to seek to do your best at what God's given you.

Who you are as a performer is one thing, but when you're making records, you're dealing with musicians' tastes, their goals, their wants, their needs, everyone's individual pride.

Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.

When you work with great musicians, they are always a part of you . . . their spirits are walking around in me, so they're still here and passing it on to others.

Why the connection with musicians? I think it's because in the end we're doing very similar things - we're telling stories, we're using poetic, lyrical language, and we're distilling stories down into their simplest form. We're both telling a story in two languages - word and music for them; and word and image for me.

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.

With pop music and pop musicians, you know everything about everyone all the time, particularly their physical appearance. With female musicians, that's made a big thing of, and I think people, certainly with me, have appreciated a bit of mystery.

With just one musician, you can really do an unlimited number of things on the inside of the piano, if you have at your disposal an exploded keyboard.

With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bell. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.

Yes, for me audio-visual performance has its roots in my experience working as an improvising musician and composer.

Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.

Writing songs is cheaper than going to therapy.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the only musician who had as much knowledge asgenius, and as much genius as knowledge.