music
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘music’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“Music is my living. I enjoy selling my music.” -James Taylor
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“One time I introduced my orchestra as the Shampoo Music Makers instead of the Champagne Music Makers.” -Lawrence Welk
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“I didn’t really see the British punk movement, if that’s what it was, as wildly original, because I had been listening so intently to all the New York music since 1973, really.” -Steven Patrick Morrissey
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“Hearing my songs in public freaks me out a bit. There was one restaurant I really liked in L.A., but I had to stop going there when they started playing my music. It felt kinda awkward.” -Fiona Apple
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“I find that classical music helps put me in a place that is very calming and allows me to express emotion through my body. I played clarinet as a child, so I guess I have a bit of a musical ear.” -Diane Kruger
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“And whether you’re drawn to gospel music or church music or honky-tonk music, it informs your character and it informs your talent.” -Bruce Springsteen
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“I don’t like rap music at all. I don’t think it’s music. It’s just a beat and rapping.” -Nina Simone
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“The music industry is a strange combination of having real and intangible assets: pop bands are brand names in themselves, and at a given stage in their careers their name alone can practically gaurantee hit records.” -Richard Branson
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“Country music is about new love and it’s about old love.” -Jeff Foxworthy
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“You know I used to listen to music a lot more.” -Brett Favre
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“I still absolutely love ‘The Sound of Music’ and anything with Julie Andrews in it.” -Kristin Scott Thomas
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“I don’t care what people say. My music’s, my music.” -Enrique Iglesias
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“I get caught up in my bubble of reading, writing, or music.” -Antonio Banderas
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“Our music’s kind of about taking something ugly and making it beautiful.” -Jerry Cantrell
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“If somebody for some reason, for music or for movie, becomes famous, it’s because they have something, something special.” -Roberto Cavalli
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“Music can affect for good or ill the body as well as the mind.” -Tomas Luis de Victoria
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“You’re now getting a new breed of people like Il Divo and Andrea Bocelli and I think that’s why people feel less intimidated by classical music than they once did.” -Katherine Jenkins
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“I try to just make music that I love, and if I believe in it that’s all that matters.” -Norah Jones
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“I was in choir in school. I kind of just did it. I already knew I wanted to sing. My music program in my school wasn’t really great – people didn’t really want to be part of the choir, they didn’t want to do the plays and stuff like that. It definitely wasn’t the cool…
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“Disco is music for dancing, and people will always want to dance.” -Giorgio Moroder
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“We’re real people and we’re a band that’s been playing on the scene for a long time. We’ve made a lot of friends, and one enemy we’ve always had was the NME. They’ve always basically slated us and they’ve basically never ever written about the music.” -Dan Hawkins
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“Distance doesn’t exist, in fact, and neither does time. Vibrations from love or music can be felt everywhere, at all times.” -Yoko Ono
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“Ain’t nobody making music to not be heard and the easiest way to be heard is to be on the radio, but you should never compromise who you are, your values or your morals.” -Talib Kweli
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“I love that sense of change that you’d get in pop music every three minutes, every four minutes.” -Danny Boyle
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“We talk a lot on ‘Biggest Loser’ about how fitness is a natural antidepressant, how it burns off stress. What I like about running is that it gives me time alone. I’m always busy, with people at work, with my kids. I love getting out for a run by myself and just listening to my…
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“Hip-hop’s always reached out to kids. If you look at the last 10 big albums it might seem ironic. But when I look at the history of this music it’s always had a lot of positivity.” -LL Cool J
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“I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.” -Russell Simmons
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“I’m really an inner spirit that only makes itself known through the music. A lot of people think I’m an introvert, or quiet and moody. I’ve even heard some people say that there’s a certain mystery or darkness about me. I’m not that way. I’m just really into what I do.” -Faith Evans
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“The one thing that kept our family together was the music. The only thing that our family would share emotionally was to have our dad cry over something the kids did with music.” -Dennis Wilson
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“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.” -Truman Capote
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“Drums just always sounded like the most fun part of that good music for me.” -Levon Helm
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“I don’t want to be an artist, go on tour and make a video and wear sexy clothes. I would just love to make music.” -Rashida Jones
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“I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate.” -Joni Mitchell
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“When you grow up in the music industry, trying to be Britney Spears because that’s what sells records and then you realize, ‘All I have to do is be myself? I should have thought of that a long time ago,’ it feels good to have success come from what’s actually inside of you.” -Jessica Simpson
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“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” -Walter Pater
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“I write music with an exclamation point!” -Richard Wagner
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“What is music anyway? It’s a form of communication, and that’s why I play the kind of music that I think – that I hope – can communicate with people.” -Kenny G
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“I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.” -Alan Greenspan
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“For some reason, the evolutionists have not come up with an evolution-based explanation for why human beings react so powerfully to music. But surely they will.” -Dennis Prager
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“In these confused times, the role of classical music is at the very core of the struggle to reassert cultural and ethical values that have always characterized our country and for which we have traditionally been honored and respected outside our shores.” -Lorin Maazel
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“I’ve never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There’s always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music.” -Thom Yorke
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“But I did go to music really early on, even when I was 4 or 5, I was responding to music probably in ways other kids were not.” -Eric Clapton
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“That’s what I love from metal, and that’s what I love from hip-hop. That’s what I love from any music that’s hard, that’s got an edge to it-The attitude in it.” -Kid Rock
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“Put you energy into music. If it fails you, you can become an accountant or a dentist. And then if you become a dentist or an accountant, it’s too late to become a musician afterwards.” -Peter Tork
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“I always knew I’d be in music in some sort of capacity. I didn’t know if I’d be successful at it, but I knew I’d be doing something in it. Maybe get a job in a record store. Maybe even play in a band. I never got into this to be a star.” -Bryan Adams
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“I always believed in the music we did and that’s why it was uncompromising.” -Jimmy Page
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“Also, because people like to multitask, in a way if you’ve got a bit of music on in the background and the lyrical content is making you want to listen to it, then that would probably put you off the texting you wanted to do. I think people like things that just make that right…
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“Music is a language and different people who come along are each using that language to do something different, but all coming at it in a similar vein inasmuch as it’s always community based and for the most part nonprofit. Most bands don’t ever come within a mile of profit – clearly these people are…
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“You listen to a piece of music and it will remind you of something – it might make you happy, it might make you sad, but it is very emotive. And I think that Duran Duran have always understood that.” -Nick Rhodes
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“It’s almost charity work, what people have done, turning other people on to my music.” -John Mayer
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“Pop is a little bit theatrical. That’s the whole vibe. That’s the point – is that it’s great music, great melodies, great hooks. But, on top of it, it’s a presentation. There’s a showmanship about it. And that’s why I wanted to be a pop star.” -Adam Lambert
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“Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.” -Archie Shepp
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“Great music is its own movie, already. And the challenge, as a music fan, is to keep the song as powerful as it wants to be, to not tamper with it and to somehow give it a home.” -Cameron Crowe
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“What we have to get clear to kids is that when you offer your stillness and open yourself to the experience of music, it pays you back more than you give.” -David Ogden Stiers
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“I enjoy being happy every day, and hopefully you can hear my happiness in my music. Life is beautiful.” -Christina Milian
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“You have to watch all sides of your advancement, you have to make sure people’s bodies and minds are healthy and their morale is cool before you can really go out and play great music.” -Shirley Manson
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“I love rock-n-roll. I think it’s an exciting art form. It’s revolutionary. Still revolutionary and it changed people. It changed their hearts. But yeah, even rock-n-roll has a lot of rubbish, really bad music.” -Nick Cave
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“Choreography is mentally draining, but there’s a pleasure in getting into the studio with the dancers and the music.” -Alvin Ailey
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“Music is universal too. Even deaf people like to dance, love rhythm, and can kind of pick it up.” -Rainn Wilson
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“I don’t write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.” -Martin Gore
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“I just change with the times. I really don’t have a say in what’s going on. Music was here before me.” -Snoop Dogg
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“Music is my life, professionally, for nearly 60 years. To be recognized by the academy is still the highest honor.” -Ray Charles
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“I’ve programmed myself musically to come up with love-feeling tracks that are romantic, sexy, but classy, all in one. And that’s the challenge. Once I create that music, then the lyrical content starts to come – you know, the stories and things like that.” -R. Kelly
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“People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words.” -Felix Mendelssohn
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“I always preferred to hang out with the outcasts, ’cause they were cooler they had better taste in music, for one thing, I guess because they had more time to develop one with the lack of social interaction they had!” -John Hughes
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“I’m not saying I wasn’t flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.” -Patti Smith
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“I would be a huge hypocrite if I didn’t tell you that at one time in my life I thought the way that you made music was you got on a major label and you got famous.” -Neko Case
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“We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn’t speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food.” -Francis Ford Coppola
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“I’ve loved Michael Jackson, his music, his music videos.” -Ashley Tisdale
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“I always want to write erotic music… Not only about the love between men and women, but in a much more universal sense – about the sensuality of the mechanism of the universe… about life.” -Toru Takemitsu
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“I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English, Spanish, Yiddish, Swahili, any other language. Pure melody goes outside time.” -Carlos Santana
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“Music is what I love to do it’s in my veins.” -Demi Lovato
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“I practice and work hard at my music, but I’m not saving lives here.” -Harry Connick, Jr.
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“From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.” -John Philip Sousa
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“But recently I began to feel that maybe I wouldn’t be able to do what I want to do and need to do with American musicians, who are imprisoned behind these bars music’s got these bars and measures you know.” -Sun Ra
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“Before you can make good music, you just have to shut up. Then the music can say what it has to say.” -Kristin Hersh
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“I have a very lively and colourful show. It’s two hours of hits and the music speaks for itself.” -Rod Stewart
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“I remember when I was coming up, the music stores where you could get guitar strings was where I got my records from. Now the place where you get your records from is where you can get your DJ mats and your mixers.” -Jam Master Jay
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“I started writing rhymes first and then put it to the music. I figured out I could lock it to the beat better if I heard the music first. I like to get a lot of tracks, put the track up and let the music talk to me about what it’s about.” -Ice T
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“Country music has always sort of been country music.” -Miranda Lambert
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“For me music is a vehicle to bring our pain to the surface, getting it back to that humble and tender spot where, with luck, it can lose its anger and become compassion again.” -Paula Cole
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“I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.” -Claude Debussy
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“It’s a really unfair world because life is, where I am all day long we listen to American music. So I don’t see why the radios in the U.S. cannot even put aside one hour a day just to play music that is not American.” -Miriam Makeba
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“There are certain pieces of music that are always attached to certain books.” -Maurice Sendak
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“I like so many different kinds of music just because all I did was listen to the radio as a kid.” -Philip Seymour Hoffman
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“I didn’t know much about him, and I wasn’t a big country music fan. I listened to the Beatles and David Bowie, so I didn’t know a lot about him.” -Joaquin Phoenix
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“But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.” -Gabriel Marcel
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“It means so much being a part of country music and the Opry.” -Martina McBride
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“If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.” -Quincy Jones
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“My friends are mostly familiar with music that plays on the mainstream radio.” -Jessica Sanchez
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“I think it’s a mistake where rap music is these days. It doesn’t seem to be able to look out of the ghetto and that’s ultimately unfortunate, because it defines our limitations.” -Saul Williams
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“Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.” -Nat King Cole
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“Great music is in a sense serene it is certain of the values it asserts.” -Rebecca West
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“If music leaves any impression at all, it does so without regard to stylistic issues.” -Aulis Sallinen
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“Color is a plastic means of creating intervals… color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.” -Hans Hofmann
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“The Christian community latched onto a lot of my music, because there were a lot of things about my struggle they related to. But I didn’t really want to come out and be identified as a Christian, because I didn’t want to be a hypocrite, because my life wasn’t right.” -Scott Stapp
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“My life so common it disappears and sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears.” -Paul Simon
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“The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.” -Igor Stravinsky
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“If I had to play only for people who liked the music because they heard it on the radio, it wouldn’t make me happy. That’s why I’m working so hard to have, yes, a profile as an artist, but also a profile as a DJ.” -David Guetta
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“Bluegrass has brought more people together and made more friends than any music in the world. You meet people at festivals and renew acquaintances year after year.” -Bill Monroe
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“Boy bands should be exploded from a great height. They’re just pretty people singing music written by others.” -Eddie Izzard
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“To me, John Lennon and Elvis Presley were punks, because they made music that evoked those emotions in people.” -Joey Ramone
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“Most recently we’ve been working in concert situations rather than clubs. because there aren’t too many rooms there like Ronnie Scott’s, that are pure music rooms, where people come specifically to listen to music.” -Chuck Mangione
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“But for the children of the poorest people we’re stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We’re not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.” -Jonathan Kozol
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“I listen to music that is of our time and I just get angry.” -Amy Winehouse
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“Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment. Cares I knew not, and cared naught about them.” -John James Audubon
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“Pop stardom is not very compelling. I’m much more interested in a relationship between performer and audience that is of equals. I came up through folk music, and there’s no pomp and circumstance to the performance. There’s no, like, ‘I’ll be the rock star, you be the adulating fan.’” -Ani DiFranco
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“Ah, reality TV: where opportunists delight in exposing opportunism! It’s kind of like the indie music scene.” -Diablo Cody
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“Social topics may hit too close to home for people, but then again, if you pull a heartstring, then that’s what country music is. It’s not just songs about getting drunk and leaving your girl.” -Kenny Chesney
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“I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being.” -Michael Tippett
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“For some young people, their first experience ever hearing punk rock music was playing the Green Bay Packers on ‘Madden’.” -Billie Joe Armstrong
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“I don’t need anybody to market or promote me. If people don’t want to hear this music, then it’s not for them. You cannot please everybody.” -Lauryn Hill
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“Music for me is an emotional thing and it really does make me happy. It’s not a tool for me to get fame or see my face in the papers or anything like that. It’s about the fact that I really do enjoy it.” -Ville Valo
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“That’s why this generation is the least racist generation ever. You see it all the time. Go to any club. People are intermingling, hanging out, having fun, enjoying the same music. Hip-hop is not just in the Bronx anymore. It’s worldwide. Everywhere you go, people are listening to hip-hop and partying together. Hip-hop has done…
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“I know that I can sing. That’s the reason I started playing music when I was twelve years old.” -Kesha
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“A country is made not by policy alone, but by its music, its entertainment shows, all of it.” -Glenn Beck
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“Olympia was a town crawling with music. I was new to the whole punk scene. The culture shock continued Olympia had bagels! We didn’t have bagels in Arkansas. You could order vegetarian food all over town! It was so crazy to me – a place with so many vegetarians, the restaurants made special dishes for…
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“Bands are about these little relationships that make everything tick, and when you create new music you’re testing those relationships.” -Jonathan Cain
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“It’s funny how the music industry is enraged about the Internet and the way things are copied without being paid for. But you know why people steal the music? Because they can’t afford the music.” -Tom Petty
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“A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself. He can live without hope, without friends, without books, even without music, as long as he can listen to his own thoughts.” -Axel Munthe
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“Half the time I feel like I’m appealing to the downer freaks out there. We start to play one downer record after another until I begin to get down myself. Give me something from 1960 or something let me get up again. The music of today is for downer freaks, and I’m an upper.” -Wolfman…
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“Music and the music business are two different things.” -Erykah Badu
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“I felt that the elegance of pop music was that it was reflective: we were holding up a mirror to our audience and reflecting them philosophically and spiritually, rather than just reflecting society or something called ‘rock and roll.’” -Pete Townshend
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“I like when guests come over early and we chop veggies and talk and play music.” -John Stamos
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“Beyond a certain point, the music isn’t mine anymore. It’s yours.” -Phil Collins
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“Music was always the distraction, so it was the obvious choice to pursue. My dad always said to find a job I love to do, that way it wouldn’t feel like a job. So I did that.” -Jason Mraz
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“When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have.” -E. W. Howe
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“A movie goes from several stages, from idea to script. As you continue shooting, you will make some adjustments. You’re constantly adjusting. It’s like a piece of music. You’re constantly trying to make it better.” -Robert Rodriguez
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“Good music is good music, and everything else can go to hell.” -Dave Matthews
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“Country music is important to me, and I love it, but it’s not my whole life.” -George Strait
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“So I wanted to sing inspirational music, and that’s exactly how I approached it – only the words have been changed to declare my relationship with God.” -Smokey Robinson
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“Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, expels diseases, softens every pain, subdues the rage of poison, and the plague.” -John Armstrong
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“The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.” -Thomas Beecham
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“Don’t make music for some vast, unseen audience or market or ratings share or even for something as tangible as money. Though it’s crucial to make a living, that shouldn’t be your inspiration. Do it for yourself.” -Billy Joel
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“Reading is more of a left-brain process, and listening to music is a right-brain function.” -Maynard James Keenan
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“People always accuse me of being motivational in a way, like it was a bad thing, but that’s just how I was raised. My mom raised me in a positive environment, with lots of love in my heart, and that reflects in my music.” -Lenny Kravitz
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“Yoga is almost like music in a way there’s no end to it.” -Sting
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“I don’t need my phone to play me music. I need it to be a phone and an e-mail thing.” -David Duchovny
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“I’ve been composing music all my life and if I’d been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.” -Anthony Hopkins
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“There’s something missing in the music industry today… and it’s music. Songs you hear don’t last, it’s just product fed to you by the industry.” -Jimmy Buffett
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“All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don’t subscribe to any of that. It’s all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the ’70s sounds nothing like the stuff from the ’80s, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the ’90s. Who’s to say what is and isn’t a certain…
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“Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.” -Johann Sebastian Bach
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“They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.” -Charlie Parker
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“Music is part of us, and either ennobles or degrades our behavior.” -Boethius
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“I’ve spent hours and hours doing research into Appalachian folk music. My grandfather was a fiddler. There is something very immediate, very simple and emotional, about that music.” -Renee Fleming
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“I don’t play pyrotechnic scales. I play about frustration, patience, anger. Music is an extension of my soul.” -Dick Dale
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“Music my rampart, and my only one.” -Edna St. Vincent Millay
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“I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.” -Axl Rose
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“Alas! all music jars when the soul’s out of tune.” -Miguel de Cervantes
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“Music was your real passion, this thing you held dear even above family. It was this relationship that never betrayed you. Once it became your job – this thing that was highly visible, this thing that became about commerce – that’s when you were holding onto music like it was a palm tree in a…
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“I only want to make music because I have a passion for it.” -Annie Lennox
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“Music has always been my protection against the world, from a very young age. I feel safe inside of a jam.” -Trey Anastasio
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“People think our music’s very aggressive or angry or whatever, and it’s just the opposite, really… I like laughing. And I like being really calm before a show, and smiley.” -Serj Tankian
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“I find Indian music very funky. I mean it’s very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it’s the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.” -John McLaughlin
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“Great classic music that I’ve been turned on to has not only inspired and influenced me, but it has had an effect on my songwriting.” -Scott Weiland
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“In our music, in our everyday life, there are so many negative things. Why not have something positive and stamp it with blackness?” -Jamie Foxx
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“Music, at its essence, is what gives us memories. And the longer a song has existed in our lives, the more memories we have of it.” -Stevie Wonder
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“Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation – what are they? They are the happiest people in the world.” -William Lyon Phelps
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“I always think I’m the Tom Cruise of music – a lot of success and fans, but no critics, darling.” -Jon Bon Jovi
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“Music is a part of my life all the time – on the plane, before matches, driving out to the court.” -Maria Sharapova
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“The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.” -Mark Zuckerberg
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“At home I’m just a guy who has interests that extend far beyond music.” -Layne Staley
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“It seems like a lot of music today is so churned out and simple.” -Jonathan Davis
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“Well, I’ll tell you, I don’t know how aware teenagers are of me. I think it really depends on the teenager and how well-versed in music they are and what kind of music they like.” -Joan Jett
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“Australia is so cool that it’s hard to even know where to start describing it. The beaches are beautiful so is the weather. Not too crowded. Great food, great music, really nice people. It must be a lot like Los Angeles was many years ago.” -Mary-Kate Olsen
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“Singing is just a feeling set to music.” -Carrie Underwood
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“The calm mind allows one to connect with the inner self, the Soul, the very source of our being. That’s where the music lives. That’s where my music comes from.” -Clarence Clemons
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