Composers from the United States

"I can't speak or write German, but I'am overjoyed because I have bought one of your pictures. Now it is in me. I write music. You are my teacher."

"Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of "sound effects" recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide."

"I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the use of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard. Photoelectric, film and mechanical mediums for the synthetic production of music will be explored."

"...WHEREAS, IN THE PAST, THE POINT OF DISAGREEMENT HAS BEEN BETWEEN DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE, IT WILL BE, IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, BETWEEN NOISE AND SO-CALLED MUSICAL SOUNDS."

"The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. The 'frame' or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer's reach."

"I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is poetry/ as I need it."

"We need not destroy the past. It is gone."

"I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love."

"A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection."

"I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment."

"A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself."

"Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."

"Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?"

"David Tudor and I went to Hilversum in Holland to make a recording for the Dutch radio. We arrived at the studio early and there was some delay. To pass the time, we chatted with the engineer who was to work with us. He asked me what kind of music he was about to record. Since he was a Dutchman I said, 'It may remind you of the work of Mondrian.' When the session was finished and the three of us were leaving the studio, I asked the engineer what he thought of the music we had played. He said, 'It reminded me of the work of Mondrian.'"

"So it was that I gave about 1949 my 'Lecture on Nothing' at the Artists' Club on Eighth Street in New York City (started by Robert Motherwell), which predated the popular one associated with Philip Pavia, Bill de Kooning, et al. ). This 'Lecture on Nothing' was written in the same rhythmic structure I employed at the time in my musical compositions (Sonatas and Interludes, Three Dances, etc.) . One of the structural divisions was the repetition, some fourteen times, of a single page in which occurred the refrain, 'If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep.' Jeanne Reynal, I remember, stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, 'John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute.' She then walked out. Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen."

"At Black Mountain College in 1952, I organized an event that involved the paintings of Bob Rauschenberg, the dancing of Merce Cunningham, films, slides, phonograph records, radios, the poetries of w:Charles Olson and M. C. Richards recited from the tops of ladders, and the pianism of David Tudor, together with my 'Juilliard lecture', which ends: 'A piece of string, a sunset, each acts.' The audience was seated in the center of all this activity. Later that summer, vacationing in New England, I visited America's first synagogue, to discover that the congregation was there seated precisely the way I had arranged the audience at Black Mountain."

"Critics frequently cry 'Dada' after attending one of my concerts or hearing one of my lectures. Others bemoan my interest in w:Zen. One of the liveliest lectures I ever heard was given by Nancy Wilson Ross at the Cornish School in Seattle. It was called Zen Buddhism and Dada. It is possible to make a connection between the two, but neither Dada nor Zen is a fixed tangible. They change; and in quite different ways in different places and times, they invigorate action. What was Dada in the 1920's is now, with the exception of the work of Marcel Duchamp, just art. What I do, I do not wish blamed on Zen, though without my engagement with Zen.. .I doubt whether I would have done what I have done. . .I often point out that Dada nowadays has in it a space, an emptiness, that it formerly lacked. What nowadays, America mid-twentieth century, is Zen?"

"I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' I said, 'Well then, I'll beat my head against that wall.' I quite literally began hitting things, and developed a music of percussion that involved noises."

"There is one term of the problem which you are not taking into account: precisely, the world. The real. You say: the real, the world as it is. But it is not, it becomes! It moves, it changes! It doesn’t wait for us to change.. .It is more mobile than you can imagine. You are getting closer to this reality when you say as it 'presents itself'; that means that it is not there, existing as an object. The world, the real is not an object. It is a process."

"Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens."

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."

"Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness."

"As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency."

"When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic — here on Sixth Avenue, for instance — I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound.. .I don't need sound to talk to me."

"They say, 'you mean it's just sounds?' thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless, whereas I love sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don't want them to be psychological. I don't want a sound to pretend that it's a bucket or that it's president or that it's in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound."

"What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before."

"I once asked Aragon, the historian, how history was written. He said, 'You have to invent it.' When I wish as now to tell of critical incidents, persons, and events that have influenced my life and work, the true answer is all of the incidents were critical, all of the people influenced me, everything that happened and that is still happening influences me."

"We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn't speak or talk like a human being, that doesn't know its definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that expresses itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is."

"John Cage ...once told me, ‘When you start working everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave."

"I'm especially interested in the music of John Cage.. ..I would like to do some experimenting with the relationship between his freeform sound and [my] free-form art."

"The rise of music that is totally without social commitment also increases the separation between composer and public, and represents still another form of departure from tradition. The cynicism with which this particular departure seems to have been made is perfectly symbolized in John Cage's account of a public lecture he had given: "Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen." While Mr. Cage's famous silent piece [i.e. 4′33″], or his Landscapes for a dozen radio receivers may be of little interest as music, they are of enormous importance historically as representing the complete abdication of the artist's power."

"Object in/ and space – the first impulse may be to give the object – a position – to place the object. (The object had a position to begin with.) Next – to change the position of the object. – Rauschenberg's early sculptures – A board with some rocks on it. The rocks can be anywhere on the board. - Cage's Japanese rock garden – The rocks can be anywhere [within the garden].."

"Once, I made a kind of sculpture of a flag in bronze: it was an edition of three, I think. One of them was given on some occasion to President Kennedy. I became very upset that this was happening. It was given on Flag Day! (he laughs). It seemed to me to be such a terrible thing to happen. I complained bitterly to my very good friend John Cage. He said: "Don't let it worry you. Just consider it as a pun on your work". (he laughs)."

"I met Cummingham around 1953 after a performance I saw. He was teaching and making dances for his company and was already working with John Cage. What interested me initially wasn't just the movement but also the music he worked with, which was unfamiliar to me.. .Later Bob Rauschenberg had been doing sets and costumes for the Cunningham Company.. .I can't say exactly how, but for a period of time, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and I saw each other frequently and exchanged ideas. John [Cage] was very interested in presenting his ideas to other people, so it was impossible to be around and not to learn.. .He could apply his ideas on space and time to painting, or music or architecture.. ..I don't have a clear sense of cause and effect in my painting, but it is probably there."

"Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the 'given' material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control."

"John Cage and I became interested in the use of chance in the 50's. I think one of the very primary things that happened then was the publication of the I Ching, the Chinese book of changes, from which you can cast your fortune: the hexagrams."

"Cage took it to work in his way of making compositions then; and he used the idea of 64 — the number of the hexagrams — to say that you had 64, for example, sounds; then you could cast, by chance, to find which sound first appeared, cast again, to say which sound came second, cast again, so that it's done by, in that sense, chance operations. Instead of finding out what you think should follow — say a particular sound — what did the I Ching suggest? Well, I took this also for dance."

"I'm just back from Halberstadt (a 20+ hour journey), having attended the ceremonious 13th note change in the hyperdurational sounding of John Cage's Organ2/ASLSP. This is the last note change to occur for seven long years, so it was particularly well attended. The image above is my vantage point -- being among the last to enter the church, I was really only able to watch the proceedings via the many cell phones held above the heads of hundreds of compatriots. (The presence of so much technology in so hallowed a space is, well, jarring.)"

"I could only write at the beach, and I kept getting sand in my typewriter."

"I hate the way he writes. I kind of love the way he lives, though."

"I have won several prizes as the world’s slowest alto player, as well as a special award in 1961 for quietness."

"I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini."

"I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast."

"I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was."

"It's like living in a house where everything's painted red."

"Not for me. If I want to tune everybody out, I just take off my glasses and enjoy the haze."

"Sometimes I get the feeling that there are orgies going on all over New York City, and somebody says, `Let's call Desmond,' and somebody else says,'Why bother? He's probably home reading the Encyclopedia Britannica.'"

"Well, that I'm not playing better."

"Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught."

"You're beginning to sound like a cross between David Frost and David Susskind, and that is a cross I cannot bear."

"Good jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms, and yells. Fine jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars and collapses on his hands and knees. A pure genius of jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra run around the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments."

"Ladies and gentlemen, please don't associate me with any of this. This is not jazz. These are sick people."

"My son's a painter. All through school his teachers tell him he's a genius. I tell him to paint me an apple that looks like an apple before he paints me one that doesn't. Go where you can go, but start from someplace recognizable. Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity."

"In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time."

"That sound in tune to you? ... Sounds sharp to me. Sounds like I'm playing sharp all the time. My singing teacher told us you should do that. Maybe I got it from her. She said singers when they grow old have a tendency to go flat. So if you sing sharp as a young person, as you get older and go flat, you'll be in tune. In other words, it's never thought good to be flat. It means you can't get to the tone."

"Since the white man says he came from the evolution of animals, well, maybe the black man didn't. The white man has made so many errors in the handling of people that maybe he did come from a gorilla or a fish and crawl up on the sand and then into the trees. Of course, evolution doesn't take God into consideration. I don't think people learned to do all the things they do through evolution."

"What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music? Had I been born in a different country or had I been born white, I am sure I would have expressed my ideas long ago. Maybe they wouldn't have been as good because when people are born free — I can't imagine it, but I've got a feeling that if it's so easy for you — the struggle and the initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say."

"It seems so hard for some of us to grow up mentally just enough to realize that there are other persons of flesh and bone, just like us, on this great, big earth. And if they don't ever stand still, move, or "swing," they are as right as we are, even if they are as wrong as hell by our standards. Yes, Miles, I am apologizing for my stupid "Blindfold Test." I can do it gladly because I'm learning a little something. No matter how much they try to say that Brubeck doesn't swing — or whatever else they're stewing or whoever else they're brewing — it's factually unimportant. Not because Dave made Time magazine — and a dollar — but mainly because Dave honestly thinks he's swinging. He feels a certain pulse and plays a certain pulse which gives him pleasure and a sense of exaltation because he's sincerely doing something the way he, Dave Brubeck, feels like doing it. And as you said in your story, Miles, "if a guy makes you pat your foot, and if you feel it down your back, etc.," then Dave is the swingingest by your own definition, Miles, because at Newport and elsewhere Dave had the whole house patting its feet and even clapping its hands...."

"I think my own way. I don't think like you and my music isn't meant just for the patting of feet and going down backs. When and if I feel gay and carefree, I write or play that way. When I feel angry I write or play that way — or when I'm happy, or depressed, even. Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions. If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music, and I would begin to worry about my writing if such a person began to really like it. My music is alive and it's about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It's angry, yet it's real because it knows it's angry."

"Each jazz musician when he takes a horn in his hand — trumpet, bass, saxophone, drums — whatever instrument he plays — each soloist, that is, when he begins to ad lib on a given composition with a title and improvise a new creative melody, this man is taking the place of a composer."

"Now, whether there is feeling or not depends upon what your environment or your association is or whatever you may have in common with the player. If you feel empathy for his personal outlook, you naturally feel him musically more than some other environmental and musical opposite who is, in a way. beyond you. I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around. But there is no need to compare composers. If you like Beethoven, Bach or Brahms, that's okay. They were all pencil composers. I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer. I thought I was, although no one's mentioned that. I mean critics or musicians. Now, what I'm getting at is that I know I'm a composer. I marvel at composition, at people who are able to take diatonic scales, chromatics, 12-tone scales, or even quarter-tone scales. I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived."

"Each jazz musician is supposed to be a composer. Whether he is or not, I don't know. I don't listen to that many people. If I did, I probably wouldn't play half as much to satisfy myself. As a youth I read a book by Debussy and he said that as soon as he finished a composition he had to forget it because it got in the way of his doing anything else new and different. And I believed him. I used to work with Tatum, and Tatum knew every tune written, including the classics, and I think it got in the way of his composition, because he wasn't a Bud Powell. He wasn't as melodically inventive as Bud. He was technically flashy and he knew so much music and so much theory that he couldn't come up with anything wrong; it was just exercising his theory."

"Let my children have music! Let them hear live music. Not noise. My children! You do what you want with your own!"

"Mingus was always a disaster to have around. I loved him, but he was worse than a child. He didn't know how to clean up behind himself. He could cook, but there would be eggs on the floor and the ceiling. Couldn't find his shoes when he had to go to work, didn't have a white shirt, couldn't write a check. All he could really do was play the bass and write."

"Although Charles Mingus probably could have performed professionally as a pianist, as evidenced on Mingus Plays Piano and Oh Yeah, he was an absolute monster on the bass, as well an incredibly gifted composer. While his bass skills can be heard on the outstanding 1953 Jazz at Massey Hall live album with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Max Roach, his landmark 1959 Columbia disc, Mingus Ah Um, is hailed by some as his finest recording. It's certainly a great place to start for uninitiated."

"I went through a lot of mental pains and anguish about choosing between jazz and classical. I realized that where I functioned was where I should be, and where I functioned was in jazz, so that was it."

"Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It's easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That's the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that's universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it... enrichment, that's the function of music."

"I always like people who have developed long and hard, particularly through introspection and a lot of dedication. I think that what they arrive at is usually...deeper and more beautiful...than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning. I say this because it's a good message to give to young talents who feel as I used to. You hear musicians playing with great fluidity and complete conception early on, and you don't have that ability. I didn't. I had to know what I was doing. And ultimately it turned out that these people weren't able to carry their thing very far. I found myself being more attracted to artists who have developed through the years and become better and deeper musicians. I believe in things that are developed through hard work."

"As the painter needs his framework of parchment, the improvising musical group needs its framework in time."

"I am interested in other keyboard sounds, but basically I'm an acoustic pianist. I’ve been happy to use the Fender-Rhodes to add a little colour to certain performances but only as an adjunct [...] It's hard for people to recognize individuals on an electric piano. Because it is an electric instrument, it's hard for a personality to come through."

"I don't think too much about the electronic thing, except that it's kind of fun to have it as an alternate voice. Like, I've used the Fender- Rhodes piano on a couple of records. I don't really look on it as a piano— merely an alternate keyboard instrument, that offers a certain kind of sound that’s appropriate sometimes. I find that it’s kind of a refreshing auxiliary to the piano— but I don't need it, you know. I guess it’s for other people to judge how effective it’s been on my records; I enjoyed it, anyway. I don't enjoy spending a lot of time with the electric piano. I mean, if I play it for a period of time, then I quickly tire of it, and I want to get back to the acoustic piano."

"[Bill Evans talking about Miles Davis's change of style to jazz fusion] I would like to hear more of the consummate melodic master, but I feel that big business and his record company have had a corrupting influence on his material. The rock and pop thing certainly draws a wider audience. It happens more and more these days, that unqualified people with executive positions try to tell musicians what is good and what is bad music. It’s tempting for the musician to prejudice his own views when recording opportunities are so infrequent but I for one am determined to resist the temptation."

"It just doesn’t attract me. I’m of a certain period, a certain evolution. I hear music differently [...] I mean, for me, comparing electric bass to acoustic bass is sacrilege."

"In the rakish, outsider’s world of jazz, Bill Evans seemed an anomaly. Bespectacled and unassuming, he had a clerical air which prompted a bandleader to nickname him ‘the minister’. Yet at the piano – head bent over the keys, eyes closed – he was the image of intensity, spinning out the luminous, questing lines Miles Davis likened to ‘quiet fire’. [...] His purity of sound, and genius for harmonies and voicings, earned him a reputation as ‘the Chopin of jazz’. Indeed, Bill Evans knew much of the classical repertoire: he’d performed Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto at college and regularly practised Bach. But his devotion to jazz was primary, as was his conviction that its essence was emotion. Though he took a rigorous view of what he called ‘the extremely severe and unique disciplines’ of jazz, and disparaged wild-eyed abandon, he regarded feeling as the ‘generating force’. That quality of feeling informs the trio recordings he made live at the Village Vanguard in 1961. Evans’s group marked a revolution in trio-playing: the pianist encouraged virtuoso bassist Scott LaFaro not simply to lay down a beat, but to engage in dialogue. Their subtle interplay, with drummer Paul Motian, illuminates such tunes as Evans’s lilting ‘Waltz for Debby’ and LaFaro’s brooding ‘Jade Visions’."

"The Brick House was one of the toughest joints I ever played in ... Guys would drink and fight one another like circle saws. Bottles would come flying over the bandstand like crazy and there was lots of plain common shooting and cutting. But somehow all that jive didn't faze me at all. I was so happy to have some place to blow my horn."

"Some of you young folks been saying to me, "Hey Pops, what you mean 'What a wonderful world'? How about all them wars all over the place? You call them wonderful? And how about hunger and pollution? That aint so wonderful either." Well how about listening to old Pops for a minute. Seems to me, it ain't the world that's so bad but what we're doin' to it. And all I'm saying is, see, what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love baby, love. That's the secret, yeah. If lots more of us loved each other, we'd solve lots more problems. And then this world would be a gasser. That's wha' ol' Pops keeps saying."

"The way they're treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell."

"Making money ain't nothing exciting to me. ... You might be able to buy a little better booze than some wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat, and when you die you're just as graveyard dead as he is."

"If you still have to ask, shame on you"

"True revolution in music took place, as far as I can see it, took place only a few times, three times in this century. One was the revolution that took place aided and abetted if not instigated by Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong did something with the trumpet that had never been done. Things that have become so casual, so common to our ears now, Louis Armstrong introduced."

"When Louis Armstrong, according to a few of his biographies, came to Chicago he was wearing a suit, the pants of which were about three inches too short, his white socks showed, he had these brogans on and he wore a derby hat. He got up on the stage and all the musicians laughed until he started to play. When he finished playing, the next day all the musicians went out and bought some pants three inches too short, some white socks and some brogan shoes and a derby hat, you understand. Louis Armstrong was on J-and never got off his J-never, never stopped. I mean for all intents and purposes, died with his trumpet in his hand. So did Duke Ellington, all those people who inspire one, who inspire me. Duke was still going on the road right up till the last. Louis Armstrong still on the road till the very last. I appreciate that, I respect it and I am grateful for it. I am grateful, in the name of my grandson I am grateful."

"When you're sick [due to drug withdrawal], music is a great help. Once in Texas, I kicked a [heroin] habit on weed, a pint of paregoric, and a few Louis Armstrong records."

"I once had a drink with Billie Holiday, and I smoked a joint with Louis Armstrong. Those are my real claims to fame."

"Louis ... was marvelous to be with. He had tremendous warmth, appeal. And I idolized him, not only for how great he was singing and playing, but for himself. ... I used to get postcards from him [from] all over the world. ... He went to every accessible place in the world."

"He was the only musician who ever lived, who can't be replaced by someone."

"I like Louis! Anything he does is all right. I don't know about his statements, though. I can do without them."

"You know you can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played — I mean even modern. … I love his approach to the trumpet; he never sounds bad. He plays on the beat and you can't miss when you play on the beat — with feeling. That's another phrase for swing."

"I loved and respected Louis Armstrong. He was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone along the way."

"Louis Armstrong is a jazz ancestor, a kind of great-grandfather, or even an Adam of jazz, with Billie Holiday nearby as a stunning and gifted Eve. What fed all of them was the music of the Mississippi River, an entity that continues to carry life and stories from the north to the south, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico with arms to encircle the Caribbean."

"I knew Louis well, he had his crazy little habits. Everyone thinks he was a druggie, but he wasn't. After every concert, he would put on a stocking cap, then he'd have his bottle of Pluto water, orange juice, Serutan and a joint. This was his formula; in fact, he used to post the recipe on bulletin boards, calling it "The Road to Good Health.""

"My most revered idols as a kid growing up were Louis Armstrong and... Duke Ellington. When I got into the record business... the first recordings I made with him were for 's Roulette label. Louis... made my dream come truer: he brought in his little band—five pieces—and agreed to use a friend of mine on piano, Duke Ellington!"

"[I]n the mid-60s during the deepening national traumas of the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, racial strife, and turmoil everywhere, my co-writer and I had an idea to write a "different" song specifically for Louis Armstrong... "". We wanted this immortal musician and performer to say, as only he could, the world really is great... At the time Louis's "Hello Dolly" was the biggest hit record in the country and... Armstrong was a bigger star than at any previous moment in his career. As he was constantly on tour... I went to Joe Glazer, ...Louis's manager ...With Glazer's permission and a small children's portable phonograph... I went down to Washington D.C. ...Between shows I auditioned our number ...Armstrong said, "Pops, I dig it. Let's do it! (Of course, we called him "Pops," and he called everybody "Pops.") ...Louis agreed to record it for minimum union scale (...$250 at the time)..."

"The then president of ... ... ...showed up at the recording session ...screamed at me that I had to be crazy to record a ballad with strings as the follow-up to "Hello Dolly" ...Finally he wanted to cancel the date and fire the musicians and me. ...[A]ll I could do to convince Newton to momentarily leave the control room... was to tell him he would go down in history as the only man who ever threw Louis Armstrong out of a recording studio. ...[A]lmost immediately ...Newton tried to storm back into the studio. ...Frank Military ...became a human barricade ...The ensuing door-pounding ...caused Frank ...to actually begin crying and plead, "You can't do this to Louis and Bob." Miraculously ...the recording of one of the most optimistic songs ever written was completed. ...[T]he record ...in the United States ...personally sabotaged by ...Newton, was a disaster. ...In England however, it became #1 ...[and] outsold both the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. It also started to become a hit in many ...European countries and ...South Africa. The EMI Corporation ...sent a telegram to ...Newton ...MUST HAVE WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD ALBUM, which meant... eight more songs in the same style... Joe Glazer advised me to forget it unless Newton paid Louis Armstrong a then undreamed-of $25,000, advance... When the pressure ...finally caused Newton to relent... Louis Armstrong completed one of the best-selling albums of his lifetime and again, posthumously, when the original single became the centerpiece of... Good Morning Vietnam..."

"In jazz, all roads lead back to Louis Armstrong. He is the supreme example of the vitality of the past animating and challenging the present. Trumpeter Art Farmer acknowledged him as ‘still the mark people go after when it comes to sheer emotion speaking through music’, and the contemporary British star Guy Barker declared that any jazz lacking the Armstrong spirit was ‘going to be missing a lot’. [...] Besides his startling playing, Armstrong’s unique scat vocals brought a new dimension to improvisation: a piece like ‘Heebie Jeebies’ seems an outpouring of pure joy, a song that doesn’t need words to convey its rhythmic and melodic gusto. And on the magnificent ‘West End Blues’. his trumpet and vocal powers combine to produce a masterpiece of searing emotion."

"On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole."

"If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they’ll murder you in your sleep."

"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read. Forget I mentioned it. This song has no message. Rise for the flag salute."

"The things that were happening in 1955 were cosmic … in terms of music history."

"Scientology, how about that? You hold on to the tin cans and then this guy asks you a bunch of questions, and if you pay enough money you get to join the master race. How's that for a religion?"

"I consider that the building materials are exactly the same as what anybody else makes the thing out of. It's just the way they look at those materials is perhaps a narrower perspective. Time and those waves are at the disposal of anyone who wants to use them."

"Classical musicians go to the conservatories, rock´n roll musicians go to the garages."

"I think it's really tragic when people get serious about stuff. It's such an absurdity to take anything really seriously … I make an honest attempt not to take anything seriously: I worked that attitude out about the time I was eighteen, I mean, what does it all mean when you get right down to it, what's the story here? Being alive is so weird."

"I think that if a person doesn't feel cynical then they're out of phase with the 20th century. Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization — you can't just swallow it whole."

"Being interviewed is one of the most abnormal things that you can do to somebody else. It's two steps removed from the Inquisition."

"I don't give a fuck if they remember me at all."

"Every socialistic type of government… produces bad art, produces social inertia, produces really unhappy people, and it's more repressive than any other kind of government."

"I'm probably more famous for sitting on the toilet than for anything else that I do."

"I'll tell you what classical music is, for those of you who don't know. Classical music is this music that was written by a bunch of dead people a long time ago. And it's formula music, the same as top forty music is formula music. In order to have a piece be classical, it has to conform to academic standards that were the current norms of that day and age … I think that people are entitled to be amused, and entertained. If they see deviations from this classical norm, it's probably good for their mental health."

"Their stupidity does not amaze me, its when they're smart that amazes me. It's baffling whenever you find someone who's smart — incredible. Soon you'll have zoos for such things."

"A wise man once said, "never discuss philosophy or politics in a disco environment.""

"When God created Republicans, he gave up on everything else."

"I like to watch the news, because I don't like people very much and when you watch the news... if you ever had an idea that people were really terrible, you could watch the news and know that you're right."

"The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse."

"I have four children, and I want them to grow up in a country that has a working First Amendment."

"The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life."

"The first thing you have to do if you want to raise nice kids, is you have to talk to them like they are people instead of talking to them like they're property."

"Let's not be too rough on our own ignorance; it's what makes America great!"

"The essence of Christianity is told to us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the Tree of Knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions."

"The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents — because they have a tame child-creature in their house."

"Rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, in order to provide articles for people who can't read."

"Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra, as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?"

"Tobacco is my favorite vegetable."

"My solos are speech-influenced rhythmically; and harmonically, they're either pentatonic, or poly-scale oriented. And there's the mixolydian mode that I also use a lot...But I'm more interested in melodic things I think the biggest challenge when you go to play a solo is trying to invent a melody on the spot."

"To me, absurdity is the only reality."

"Well I think that progress is not possible without deviation. And I think that it's important that people be aware of some of the creative ways in which some of their fellow men are deviating from the norm, because in some instances they might find these deviations inspiring and might suggest further deviations which might cause progress, you never know."

"It's time for a revolution, but probably not in the terms that people imagine it. The word seems to conjure up images of— sort of a modern day version of peasants going into the street with their pitch forks to go after the bad guy who lives in a big house someplace on a hill and we're gonna get that son-of-a-bitch and we'll take all the stuff away from him and we'll give it to the workers, you know. And that's not the kind of revolution I had in mind. ... Well, I thought that it might be nice if it was handled a little bit more modern and efficient way, without people getting slaughtered in the street. It's a matter of infiltration."

"So many books, so little time."

"So I'm watchin' and I'm waitin' Hopin' for the best Even think I'll go to prayin' Every time I hear 'em sayin' That there's no way to delay That trouble comin' every day No way to delay That trouble comin' every day"

"Hey, you know something people? I'm not black, But there's a whole lots a times I wish I could say I'm not white."

"And it's the same across the nation Black and white discrimination Yellin' "You can't understand me!" 'N all that other jazz they hand me In the papers and TV and All that mass stupidity That seems to grow more every day Each time you hear some nitwit say He wants to go and do you in Because the color of your skin Just don't appeal to him (No matter if it's black or white) Because he's out for blood tonight."

"I may be vile and pernicious But you can't look away I make you think I'm delicious With the stuff that I say I'm the best you can get Have you guessed me yet? I'm the slime oozin' out From your TV set."

"Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow."

"Look here brother, who you jivin' with that cosmik debris?"

"Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny."

"Frank Zappa: I would say the illusion [of freedom] will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move all the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre."

"You're an asshole! You're an asshole! That's right! You're an asshole! You're an asshole! Yes yes!"

"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best…"

"You know, people are basically shitty. It’s when they prove it over and over again that it gets obnoxious."

"We live in a very special time right now. At no other time in history has there been such mass disillusionment in terms of reliance on governing functions. Most people don’t want to come to terms with that. It’s been proven over and over again that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, but most people don’t like to look at naked emperors. In the process of turning around to avert their eyes, they saw the discotheques and a few other things and latched onto them."

"There’s no reason to assume that my idea of what‘s better would really be better. I resent it when other people try to inflict their ideas of betterness on me. I don’t think they know. And I can’t see any authority on the horizon that’s got any answers that seem worthwhile. Most of the things that are suggested are probably detrimental to your mental health."

"Organized religions by their very natures are misleading. The bottom line is always money. What that’s got to do with your spiritual well-being still eludes me. It’s always the bucks, no matter how they disguise it. If you need that sort of assistance to keep yourself together, you may be paying a higher rate to a fake religion than you would to a psychotherapist. Which is not to say that a psychotherapist is going to give you any better value per dollar either. lf you’re going to deal with reality, you’re going to have to make one big discovery: Reality is something that belongs to you as an individual. If you wanna grow up, which most people don’t, the thing to do is take responsibility for your own reality and deal with it on your own terms. Don’t expect that because you pay some money to somebody else or take a pledge or join a club or run down the street or wear a special bunch of clothes or play a certain sport or even drink Perrier water, it’s going to take care of everything for you. Because it all comes from inside. As a matter of fact, that’s where it stays."

"Certification from one source or another seems to be the most important thing to people all over the world. A piece of paper from a school that says you’re smart, a pat on the head from your parents that says you’re good or some reinforcement from your peers that makes you think what you’re doing is worthwhile. People are just waiting around to get certified."

"The lifestyle that I have is probably neither desirable nor useful to most people. Most people are probably better off getting the certification they desire and spindling their lives away the way they’re doing. I don’t think they’d enjoy living any other way. There are millions of people who acquire all sorts of wonderful feelings from watching a football game and drinking a bottle of beer. It makes them really happy. Doesn’t do shit for me. But for them it’s life itself. As long as they can believe in the beer and the football, then they’ve really got something. And it’s probably more useful to them than religion. So why take it away? Why tell them what’s really going on? Let ’em be happy."

"If a person wants to write music and lyrics, he has a perfect right to express his views on a certain subject. I would feel wrong if I were to express anything that I didn’t believe in. I write what I like to write. Those who like to listen to it, listen to it. And the ones who don’t, watch football and drink beer, jog, go to discos and so forth. I never claimed to be a man for all seasons."

"Just because somebody hears something you say, or reads something that you write, doesn’t mean you’ve reached them. With reading comprehension being what it is in the U. S., you can safely toss that one out the window. If you want to judge by the listening habits of people who buy records, the first thing they do is put it on and talk over it."

"So much gets lost in the translation. Even if you sat there listening to it with a microscope, there’s no way you’re gonna find out what it means."

"People have preposterous ideas about what those songs are about and what the music means. They start spouting all this shit that’s so far off the mark, it’s revolting. But if that’s how they derive pleasure, who am I to deprive them of it? Let ’em enjoy it. It’s there for their edification. But total comprehension is out of the question."

"I can’t talk to you about music because you don’t know anything about music. I can talk to you about politics or sociology and all that peripheral stuff, but I can’t talk to you about music. There’s not enough information in common that I could say to you so you’d be able to understand. Besides, the people who read OUI don’t give a fuck about music anyway."

"The cool-person syndrome is peculiarly American. Part of that has to do with the way the educational business is run in the U.S. It’s not based on how much you can teach your child: it’s based on how much money the suppliers of basic materials can make off your child. Somewhere along the line most people pick up the desire to be a cool person, which is just another way to make them buy things. Once you’ve decided that you need to be a cool person, it makes you a possible victim of anyone whose products are the equivalent of bottled smoke. Somebody tells you to buy this particularly useless item and you’ll be a cool person. No matter how stupid it seems, you have to buy it. Pet Rocks. Pringle’s potato chips. whatever it is — the newest, the latest. Since the cool-person thing is something you learn in school, and since the school business is pretty suspicious and definitely tied up with the government, it makes you wonder whether or not the desire to be cool is part of a government plot to make you buy stupid things."

"The U.S. is a mere pup tent of a civilization. We’ve got two hundred years of stupidity behind us and we think we’re right up there with everyone else who’s been doing it for thousands of years."

"The richest people in the world aren’t particularly smart or happy. And the happiest people in the world aren’t particularly smart or rich.… That leaves me making music. But we can’t talk about that."

"Everything on this planet has something to do with music. Music functions in the realm of sculptured air. Polluted as our atmosphere might be, air is the thing that makes music work. Since all other things that occur in the sound domain are transmitted to the ear through that swirling mass, depending on how wide you want to make your definition, you could perceive quite a bit of human experience in terms of music."

"I think the music of the Fifties is really good. I suspect it’s much better musically than much of what’s available now. Not in terms of production, but in terms of content. One good believable song about some guy’s girlfriend and how they broke up — a sincere one — is better than twenty albums of English rock that’s ever been produced."

"Most people don’t think I’m rational. They’re too busy featuring their hurt. They find it irrational not to feature your hurt. That’s how fucked up they are."

"There isn’t anything weird about my music. Weird is a skeleton in the closet, wearing a rubber mask with warts all over its nose, and all that kind of shit. That’s not what I do. The thing that makes my music unusual is that people only hear one kind of music all the time over the radio. It’s wallpaper to their lives. Audile wallpaper. There’s one acceptable beat and there are three acceptable chord progressions. There are five acceptable words: baby, love, tears, yat yat. Just because I don’t deal in those terms doesn’t mean I’m weird. So tell these people: I ain’t weird; I’m rational. I’m a person who can choose to write stuff like that, or choose to write stuff that includes all the notes on the piano played at once, followed by a cement truck driving over the piano, followed by a small atomic explosion. Nothing weird about that as long as you do it in a meaningful way."

"Music is the only religion that delivers the goods. All music is good. It fulfills a social function. It's like wallpaper to your lifestyle. It defines what you are."

"I love the guitar, always have. I can relate to it a lot better than a saxophone."

"I don't do drugs, nor have I ever believed in them. Am I a creative person? Then why do people think in order to be creative one must do drugs? Actually, I think people take them as an excuse to screw up in public, y'know, spill things or get silly. Drugs have slowed down civilization because we have to wait for people to get off their high before we can resume. They are the millstone around society's neck."

"I have an important message to deliver to all the cute people all over the world. If you're out there and you're cute, maybe you're beautiful. I just want to tell you somethin' — there's more of us UGLY MOTHERFUCKERS than you are, hey-y, so watch out."

"Beauty is a pair of shoes that makes you wanna die."

"Whoever we are, wherever we're from We shoulda noticed by now, our behavior is dumb.And if our chances expect to improve. It's gonna take a lot more, than trying to remove the other race.Or the other whatever, from the face of the planet altogether."

"You can't run a country by a book of religion. Not by a heap or a lump or a smidgen. Of foolish rules of ancient date. Designed to make you all feel great. While you fold, spindle and mutilate.Those unbelievers from a neighboring state."

"TO ARMS! TO ARMS! Hooray! That's great! Two legs ain't bad unless there's a crate. They ship the parts to mama for souvenirs: two ears -- Get Down!"

"The Good Book says: "It's gotta be that way!" But their book says: "REVENGE THE CRUSADES!!!!... After all, he wrote this book here, and in the book it says he made us all to be just like him! So if we're dumb, then God is dumb — and maybe even a little ugly on the side."

"Remember there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over."

"There are three things that smell of fish. One of them is fish. The other two are growing on you!"

"You say your life's a bum deal 'n yer up against the wall. Well, people, you ain't even got no deal at all. 'Cause what they do in Washington. They just takes care of Number One. An' Number One ain't you. You ain't even Number Two!"

"Shes a valley girl In a clothing store Okay, fine... Fer sure, fer sure."

"On Ventura, there she goes She just bought some bitch'n clothes Tosses her head n flips her hair She got a whole bunch of nothin in there"

"I think that if you use the so-called "strong words" you'll get your point across faster and you can save a lot of beating around the bush. Why are people afraid of words? Sometimes the dumbest thing that gets said makes the point for you."

"I'm a conservative, and you might not like that, but I am, and the fact of the matter is, this bill that they're talking about in Maryland is stupid."

"Do you think you are protecting somebody by taking away seven words?"

"Tell you what — Kiss my ass! How do you like that…?"

"Why should I smile when I'm sitting here with you?"

"The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe … I really think that. … When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view, and if that code happens to be very, very right wing, almost toward Attila the Hun..."

"I've smoked ten marijuana cigarettes in my life, and probably the last time I had one near my face was twelve, fifteen years ago. And the reason I did was because, since I do smoke, people would say, "Here, smoke this, you'll get high." So I smoked it, and it gave me a sore throat and made me sleepy. And I must either presume that that's what high means, or something was wrong. But I've never had a positive result from smoking marijuana. It just wasn't my cup of tea. And I never used LSD, never used cocaine, never used heroin or any of that other stuff."

"For the record, folks; I never took a shit on stage and the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973."

"The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball...I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon."

"A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians."

"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice — there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."

"If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT."

"Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe."

"We're not talking light-hearted foolishness here — when we go for stupid we go for BIG STUPID — like people who shoot at you on the freeway, or the Rambos and Rambo-ettes who blow people away in shopping malls and fast-food restaurants with automatic weapons."

"My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can. Children are naive — they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble."

"Gail has said in interviews that one of the things that makes our relationship work is the fact that we hardly ever get to talk to each other."

"The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consistent and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only "good guys" in it, or eating cottage cheese."

"A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole."

"The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like."

"There is no hell. There is only France."

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it."

"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we'd all love one another."

"The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced."

"Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."

"Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see which has people in it who believe a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence."

"The '60s was really stupid … It was a type of merchandising, Americans had this hideous weakness, they had this desire to be OK, fun guys and gals, and they haven't come to terms with the reality of the situation: we were not created equal. Some people can do carpentry, some people can do mathematics, some people are brain surgeons and some people are winos and that's the way it is, and we're not all the same. This concept of one world-ism, everything blended and smoothed out to this mediocre norm that everybody downgrades themselves to be is stupid. The '60s was merchandised to the public at large... My pet theory about the '60s is that there is a sinister plot behind it... The lessons learnt in the '60s about merchandising stupidity to the American public on a large scale have been used over and over again since that time."

"Politics is the entertainment division of the Military Industrial Complex."

"In the fight between you and the world, back the world."

"The Shaggs: better than The Beatles"

"People close to Zappa told me there was a good chance he could be diagnosed as manic-depressive if "they" ever got a chance to look at him. There was no way I could know if he'd have the patience to give me one minute or one hour. Expect anything, they said. Radical mood swing is the core of Zappa’s personality — and no doubt the core of his creativity as well. When I knocked on Frank’s door, he opened it with the slightest possible shred of acknowledgment. No handshake. I knew immediately where his mood swing was at the moment – several fathoms below sea level. That long black cloud was down and was there to stay for the duration of our first interview. His disdain for the ‘interrogation,’ as he called it, remained obvious. On our next encounter, the cloud disappeared and Zappa lightened up, rapping casually with fans who wandered in, and generally enjoying himself. Surprisingly, the results of both sessions were somehow consistent: Laced in with Zappa’s unrelenting cynicism, the hilarity was always there — regardless of what mood he was in. The only difference seemed to be whether or not he was laughing."

"Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon."

"Music can imply the infinite if enough things depart from the norm far enough. Strange "abnormal" events can lead to the feeling that anything can happen, and you have a music with no boundaries."

"The composer makes plans, music laughs."

"After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles."

"It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with."

"...The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection."

"To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who's ready to do that?"

"To me, I took a militant attitude towards sounds. I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human being might be free. That was my idea about sound. It still is, that they should breathe … not to be used for the vested interest of an idea. I feel that music should have no vested interests, that you shouldn't know how it's made, that you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know anything about it … except that it's some kind of life force that to some degree really changes your life … if you're into it."

"For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart."

"My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. . . . He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said, "What about the man on the street?" At that moment . . . Jackson Pollock was crossing the street."

"Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?"

"Sound is all our dreams of music. Noise is music's dreams of us."

"If you don't have a friend who's a painter, you're in trouble."

"[Regarding indeterminacy]"...I think this interest had to do with his interest in painting. He used to put sheets of graph paper on the wall, and work on them like paintings. Slowly his notation would accumulate, and from time to time he'd stand back to look at the overall design. For him it had less to do with belief in chance: it was more function than anything else. He would talk about different weights of sound - and that was simply the easiest way to express them. Pitches didn't really matter, as there were so many other controls, and he used chance without its interfering with expression. What Cage admired in him and what they had most in common was heroism - trusting in performers, despite the risk that they might destroy the thing completely. Unless the performer committed himself to the pieces, they could be horrible, and it was their very dangerousness which made them so beautiful. Cage's were beautiful in the same way, just because you never knew what would come next." - Christian Wolff, Composer and Pianist"

""...We met in 1950, through John Cage, when I was sixteen and he in his early twenties. We were all doing work that was clearly different, newly different - from one another, but joined by our delight in each other's work (and by John Cage's organizing the concerts of it and a few musicians, David Tudor centrally, playing it), and by its difference from any other we knew. I still find mysterious his way of putting the music together, or rather of erasing any traces of a sense of its having been put together: it's just there. How does he do it? He's the only composer I know whose work seems made in a way that cannot be accounted for, explained, by any other means than the impossible one of becoming that composer oneself. He talked wonderfully, sharply, outrageously, but that wasn't quite his music. One thinks of the disparity of his large, strong presence and the delicate, hypersoft music, but in fact he too was, among other things, full of tenderness and the music is, among other things, as tough as nails." - Christian Wolff, Composer and Pianist"

"I have been surprised, excited and pleasantly shocked by these comics that are extensions of the songs that I have loved and therefore welcome these amazing stories of pictures and words because they are uncompromisingly inspiring. It shows you thought is a powerful, formidable essence and can have a breathtaking domino effect."

"That is some funky-fresh, pop lockin' shit."

"If I saw someone destroy a piano I'd fuckin' kill 'em. Wouldn't think twice. [It's] Just defending your best friend!"

"This is very simple in the world of chicks: some are hoochies, some are not, and some should never try to be. It's no different from the idea of sports. Now, I can go on my little rowing machine for four times a week, twenty-two minutes a time, and I can feel as if I flirt with the sporting world. Similar to the idea that a woman can put on something cuter for her man, for those moments, and flirt with garments that a hoochie woman might be pushing. But never for one moment should you get confused. My little rowing machine and I cannot consider ourselves athletes. Wearing the same garment does not a hoochie woman make. So if you are a true hoochie woman, may garments below the navel always be in your future. If you are not, then please don't throw away your cotton zippy jacket."

"...the most influential journeys I have had have been with Ayahuasca, the vine from the Amazon, the combination of that and mushrooms. They give me the trots and such! It's very much a medicine woman, medicine man's journey drug, where you go inside. It's not a social thing. It's an internal experience. I experiment with things that are usually an internal experience, because that's just what excites me. And yes, it does sometimes give me visions. But my intention when I am doing it is very different than recreational. I don't do it recreationally. I do it to go do inner work, and I'm very clear before I do it what I'm searching for. That way, there's no abuse suffered and I don't rely on it. It's just one more tool that I use sometimes."

"Yeah, there was a period in the late '80s where I was working with different shaman. Myself and a friend, Beene, would take ayahuasca - but it wouldn't be in the liquid form, it would be a freeze-dried pill - and mushrooms. Some of those trips were eighteen hours long and I'll never forget, once I ended up sitting by the bush trying to ask the flowers why they didn't like me. It's like, Why can't I be your friend? I was crawling out of my skin at that time. In my twenties I was really... I was just losing my mind."

"Men have periods, too... they just don´t bleed."

"I love my Saab."

"I got a Saab Convertible."

"And I started to think about this story that was taking over my car at that moment. "Jamaica Inn" walked into my Saab and she said, "You might not like my story because i'm not gonna tell you how it ends yet, and you need to travel it with me."

"And my Saab is so great I'm gonna marry it."

"Dark Energy. It can be found in the observable Universe. Found in ratios of 75% more than any other substance. Dark Energy. It can be found in religious extremists, in cheerleaders. To come to the conclusion that Dark signifies mean and malevolent would define 75% of the Universe as an evil force. Alternatively, to think that some cheerleaders don't have razors in their snatch is to be foolishly unarmed."

"Beck's bass player (Justin Meldal-Johnsen) suggested I do a cover of Slayer's 'Raining Blood," she says applying strawberry lip balm with her pinkie. "I was reading about what was going on in Afghanistan--the way women were being oppressed, the destruction of religious statues. And when i heard that song, i just imagined a huge juicy vagina coming out of the sky, raining blood over all those racist, misogynist fuckers."

"Babooshka's just one of those song's you just can't get out of your head, can you? You know, how she just takes a word, and you start seeing images and pictures. To a word that maybe you haven't used … it's "Babooshka" and she's turned that into an emotion, that's just how she's able to use a combination of a word and a combination of a melody and the rhythm of that, and it creates a new language."

"I just remember pulling aside, I was driving, and I heard it on the radio, in the states — and she didn't really get played a lot in the states, until that song — that really got played — a lot. I remember, I had to pull over, and listen to it, because I'd never heard anything like it."

"The intention is to tell a story, to create a sonic world for us, a sonic painting, for us to walk into, without having to see her. She's transcending that. She's choosing to transcend that. And that's a very powerful thing to do."

"And I rode along side Till you lost me there In the open road And I rode along side Till the honey spread Itself so thin For me to break your bread For me to take your word I had to steal it."

"You could taste heaven perfectly."

"An angel's face is tricky to wear constantly."

"Just what God needs: one more victim. Why do we crucify ourselves?"

"Got enough guilt to start my own religion."

"I've got a cat named Easter; he says, 'Will you ever learn? You're just an empty cage, girl, if you kill the bird.'"

"It was me And a gun And a manOn my back But I haven't seen Barbados so I must get out of this"

"I found the secret to life; I'm okay when everything is not okay"

"God, sometimes you just don't come through. Do you need a woman to look after you?"

"So if I die today, I'll be the happy phantom, And I'll go chasing the nuns out in the yard, ...And the atrocities of school I can forgive: The happy phantom has no right to bitch."

"Look, I'm standing naked before you; Don't you want more than my sex? I can scream as loud as your last one, But I can't claim innocence."

"So you can make me cum; that doesn't make you Jesus."

"So you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts. What's so amazing about really deep thoughts? Boy, you'd best pray that I bleed real soon -- How's that thought for you?"

"Years go by Will I still be waiting For somebody else to understand Years go by If I'm stripped of my beauty And the orange clouds Raining in head Years go by Will I choke on my tears Till finally there is nothing left One more casualty You know we're too easy Easy Easy"

"I think there are pieces of me you've never seen."

"I can't believe that I would keep, keep you from flying And I would cry a thousand more if that's what it takes to sail you home."

"If you know me so well, then tell me which hand I use."

"A man bites into a dry peach and says "This peach is not good;" the peach replies "It is not my fault that you don't know the proper use for a dry peach.""

"Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again."

"Nothing's gonna stop me from floating."

"I have got my rape hat on, honey, but I always could accessorize."

"You thought that you were the bomb, yes well so did I."

"Just having thoughts of Marianne, quickest girl in the frying pan."

"Say a word to the hangman for me, me and my baby."

"Is it sweet, your sting?"

"So she prays for a prankster and lust in the marriage bed And he waits till she can give And he waits and he waits."

"And I fear my fear is greater than my faith"

"Driving in my Saab, on my way to Ireland."

"The composer who is frightened of losing his artistic integrity through contact with a mass audience is no longer aware of the meaning of the word art."

"For me, the most important thing is the element of chance that is built into a live performance. The very great drawback of recorded sound is the fact that it is always the same. No matter how wonderful a recording is, I know that I couldn't live with it--even of my own music--with the same nuances forever."

"I hope my recordings of my own works won't inhibit other people's performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn't always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience."

"If the listener does eventually come to the point where he makes the ultimate performance by splicing tapes from other musicians' recordings, he will eventually become just as bored with it as with other recordings, for it will still always be the same. Look, for instance, at electronic music. The boys are already becoming bored with what they do because they put it irrevocably on tape. The best indication of this is that more and more they are mixing the live performance element with their tapes."

"I object to background music no matter how good it is. Composers want people to listen to their music, they don't want them doing something else while their music is on. I'd like to get the guy who sold all those big businessmen the idea of putting music in the elevators, for he was really clever. What on earth good does it do anybody to hear those four or eight bars while going up a few flights."

"I adore extravagance but I abhor waste."

"I don't compose. I assemble materials."

"Somehow, suddenly, a musical idea occurs to you; either a whole phrase, or three notes, or a series of chords, something that seems pregnant with possibilities for development. Once you have the kinds of ideas that fascinate you, you're no longer in a position to decide the nature of the animal. It's going to take its essence from the musical ideas that occur to you....Some musical ideas are too short, they don't seem long enough to carry you through ten minutes of music, so you have to start searching about for other ideas; contrasting ones that seem to fit with the original ones."

"So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it."

"If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles."

"Nadia Boulanger was quite aware that as a composition teacher she labored under two further disadvantages: she was not herself a regularly practicing composer and in so far as she composed at all she must of necessity be listed in that unenviable category of the woman composer. Everyone knows that the high achievement of women musicians as vocalists and instrumentalists has no counterpart in the field of musical composition. This historically poor showing has puzzled more than one observer. ... Is it possible that there is a mysterious element in the nature of musical creativity that runs counter to the nature of the feminine mind? ... The future may very well have a different tale to tell; for the present, however, no woman's name will be found on the list of world-famous composers."

""I can't believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat something they have missed, when they can sit at home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it. I can't imagine what would happen to literature today if one were obliged to congregate in an unpleasant hall and read novels projected on a screen." See: recording Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ."

""Somebody will ask those of us who compose with the aid of computers: 'So you make all these decisions for the computer or the electronic medium but wouldn't you like to have a performer who makes certain other decisions?' Many composers don't mind collaborating with the performer with regards to decisions of tempo, or rhythm, or dynamics, or timbre, but ask them if they would allow the performer to make decisions with regard to pitch and the answer will be 'Pitches you don't change.' Some of us feel the same way in regard to the other musical aspects that are traditionally considered secondary, but which we consider fundamental. As for the future of electronic music, it seems quite obvious to me that its unique resources guarantee its use, because it has shifted the boundaries of music away from the limitations of the acoustical instrument, of the performer's coordinating capabilities, to the almost infinite limitations of the electronic instrument. The new limitations are the human ones of perception." Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ."

""We have all been affected as composers, as teachers, as musicians by recordings to an extent that cannot possibly be calculated as yet or predicted for the future. The music which is being most widely disseminated and most widely discussed, and therefore most widely imitated and influential, is that music which is available on records. The music that is only published is very little known. I don't think one can possibly exaggerate the extent to which the climate of music today is determined by the fact that the total Webern is available on records, that the total Schoenberg is becoming available." Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ."

"Naturally, since I am not concerned with normative allegations, I cannot be concerned here with the invocation of the overtone series as a 'natural' phenomenon, and that application of equivocation which then would label as 'un-natural' (in the sense, it would appear, of morally perverse) music which is not 'founded' on it. Now, what music, in what sense, ever had been founded on it?"

""The issue of 'science' does not intrude itself directly upon the occasion of the performance of a musical work, at least a non-electronically produced work, since—as has been said—there is at least a question as to whether the question as to whether musical composition is to be regarded as a science or not is indeed really a question; but there is no doubt that the question as to whether musical discourse or—more precisely—the theory of music should be subject to the methodological criteria of scientific method and the attendant scientific language is a question, except that the question is really not the normative one of whether it 'should be' or 'must be,' but the factual one that it is, not because of the nature of musical theory, but because of the nature and scope of scientific method and language, whose domain of application is such that if it is not extensible to musical theory, then musical theory is not a theory in any sense in which the term ever has been employed. This should sound neither contentious nor portentous, rather it should be obvious to the point of virtual tautology.”"

"This compositional variety is mediated by a highly redundant set structure, a second-order all-combinatorial set; each set form is hexachordally equivalent to or totally disjunct from fifteen other set forms, so that one-third of all the available set forms belong to a collection of sets which are hexachordally aggregate forming, that is, hexachordally identical."

"I thought I might die. But then I thought, 'Other people have made it through these things before'. I kept my eyes on the lights on shore and kept swimming."

"I don’t know if I should present this award on behalf of all the cowboys shot in all the John Ford Westerns over the years"

"Having the security of being in a series week in, week out gives you great flexibility; you can experience with yourself, try a different scene different ways. If you make a mistake one week, you can look at it and say, 'Well, I won't do that again,' and you're still on the air next week."

"There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again."

"I've actually had people come up to me and ask me to autograph their guns."

"With that kind of money, I could have invaded some country."

"Everybody wonders why I continue working at this stage. I keep working because there's always new stories. … And as long as people want me to tell them, I'll be there doing them."

"In recent times it just seems that women have been relegated to either romantic roles or fluff pieces. So the appeal, for me, is to make a picture about a real woman."

"I never thought it was a good idea for attorneys to be president, anyway. ... I think it is maybe time -- what do you think -- for maybe a businessman. How about that? A stellar businessman."

"[...] secretly everybody's getting tired of political correctness, kissing up. That's the kiss-ass generation we're in right now. We're really in a pussy generation. Everybody's walking on eggshells. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff."

"'Don't just do something, stand there.' Gary Cooper wasn't afraid to do nothing."

"I wanted to play it with an economy of words and create this whole feeling through attitude and movement. It was just the kind of character I had envisioned for a long time, keep to the mystery and allude to what happened in the past. It came about after the frustration of doing Rawhide for so long. I felt the less he said the stronger he became and the more he grew in the imagination of the audience."

"Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino play losers very well. But my audience like to be in there vicariously with a winner. That isn't always popular with critics. My characters have sensitivity and vulnerabilities, but they're still winners. I don't pretend to understand losers. When I read a script about a loser I think of people in life who are losers and they seem to want it that way. It's a compulsive philosophy with them. Winners tell themselves, I'm as bright as the next person. I can do it. Nothing can stop me."

"Westerns. A period gone by, the pioneer, the loner operating by himself, without benefit of society. It usually has something to do with some sort of vengeance; he takes care of the vengeance himself, doesn't call the police. Like Robin Hood. It's the last masculine frontier. Romantic myth. I guess, though it's hard to think about anything romantic today. In a Western you can think, Jesus, there was a time when man was alone, on horseback, out there where man hasn't spoiled the land yet."

"This is one politician who doesn't have ambitions to leave Carmel."

"The roles that Eastwood has played, and the films that he has directed, cannot be disentangled from the nature of the American culture of the last quarter century, its fantasies and its realities."

"Lazy, and would cost you a morning. I never started a day with Clint Eastwood in the first scene, because you knew he was gonna be late, at least a half hour or an hour."

"At that time I needed a mask rather than an actor, and Eastwood had only two facial expressions: one with the hat and one without it."

"It could be that today's conservative movement remains in thrall to the same narrative that has defined its attitude toward film and the arts for decades. Inspired by feelings of exclusion after Hollywood and the popular culture turned leftward in the '60s and '70s, this narrative has defined the film industry as an irredeemably liberal institution toward which conservatives can only act in opposition—never engagement. Ironically, this narrative ignores the actual history of Hollywood, in which conservatives had a strong presence from the industry's founding in the early 20th century up through the '40s, '50s and into the mid-'60s]. The conservative Hollywood community at that time included such leading directors as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Cecil B. DeMille, and major stars like John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Charlton Heston. These talents often worked side by side with notable Hollywood liberals like directors Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and John Huston, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Spencer Tracy. The richness of classic Hollywood cinema is widely regarded as a testament to the ability of these two communities to work together, regardless of political differences. As the younger, more left-leaning "New Hollywood" generation swept into the industry in the late '60s and '70s, this older group of Hollywood conservatives faded away, never to be replaced. Except for a brief period in the '80s when the Reagan Presidency led to a conservative reengagement with film—with popular stars like Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger making macho, patriotic action films—conservatives appeared to abandon popular culture altogether. In the wake of this retreat, conservative failure to engage with Hollywood now appears to have been recast by today's East Coast conservative establishment into a generalized opposition toward film and popular culture itself. In the early '90s, conservative film critic Michael Medved codified this oppositional feeling toward Hollywood in his best-selling book Hollywood vs. America."

"He just made my day. What a guy."

"I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lining the loops in unison, and letting them slowly shift out of phase with each other..."

"...in serial music, the series itself is seldom audible... What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one in the same thing."

"What I don't want to do is to go and buy a bunch of exotic-looking drums and set up an Afrikanische Musik in New York City."

"Do I have to tell you about the spiritual cannibalism of the culture, our culture, which has been bombarding us with ultrasensory overstimulation aiming to reprocess us into fulltime consumption machines, stealing above all from us our time (not an inch of time without an imprint of message), and even our very sense of time (to be measured in lengths of no more than one message unit each) under the guise of entertainment, and even of 'art,' commoditizing the eternal, hyping the primal? Our time is the sine qua non of our identity. We need to take extreme measures to reclaim it for ourselves and each other."

"The very being of music is created by cognitive attributions made by individual perceiving or conceiving imaginers, in individual acts of perceiving or conceiving--that, in fact, the only real music 'theory' IS the creative-intellectual transaction which ontologizes music itself."

"Even discourse which does not acknowledge "musical coherence" as "intellectual communication" does not in fact succeed in treating it as anything else; it is only by locating their concerns in domains where the "musical" aspects of music are peripherally or not at all involved that musical discourses can circumvent the fact that when the "object of thought" consists of the contents of a musical composition just the recognition of the identities of any of these contents (or even of the undivided single identity of them taken all together as a "unit") involves (to varying degrees) the same considerations that are involved in a discourse that explicitly--and hence with a better chance of cognitive particularity--regards such a composition as an instance of communicative thought."

"Even the most, emotive view of music has to be emotive about something distinct, which necessarily involves having a theory about it, for better or worse, in awareness or unawareness, and that a musical something distinct can be cognitively understood as an "emotional experience" only insofar as it is first cognitively understood as a human-communicative manifestation, as an "instance of thought"."

"Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the "given" material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control."

"One day I said to myself that it would be better to get rid of all that—melody, rhythm, harmony, etc. This was not a negative thought and did not mean that it was necessary to avoid them, but rather that, while doing something else, they would appear spontaneously. We had to liberate ourselves from the direct and peremptory consequence of intention and effect, because the intention would always be our own and would be circumscribed, when so many other forces are evidently in action in the final effect."

"Form is a theatrical event of a certain length, and the length itself may be unpredictable."

"The beautiful are shyer than the ugly, for they move in a world that does not ask for beauty."

"The same piece of music alters at each hearing. But oh, the need to repeat and repeat and repeat unchanged the sexual experience."

"Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable."

"Art means to dare — and to have been right."

"Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been 'You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.' Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important."

"When I was a child and my mother and I would read about such events in the newspapers or see them in newsreels, she used to tell me, “Always look for the helpers. There’s always someone who is trying to help.”"

"There was something else my mother did that I've always remembered: "Always look for the helpers," she'd tell me. "There's always someone who is trying to help.""

"Isn’t it amazing how much human beings are able to take? I wonder what the breaking point is. But I always look for the faithful remnant. You think that everything is lost and nobody believes in anything that is healthy anymore and all of a sudden you find this faithful remnant of hope. It’s like my mother said, always look for the helpers. At the edge of any disaster, you will find them."

"This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, 'You've made this day a special day, by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you; and I like you just the way you are.' And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health."

"You know, I think everybody longs to be loved, and longs to know that he or she is lovable. And, consequently, the greatest thing that we can do is to help somebody know that they're loved and capable of loving."

"Yes, when I was here the first word of the alma mater was 'Men…Men of Dartmouth, give a rouse…' Well, now the first word is 'Dear.' Some things change for the better."

"Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal."

"Well, what is essential about you? And who are those who have helped you become the person that you are? Anyone who has ever graduated from a college, anyone who has ever been able to sustain a good work, has had at least one person and often many who have believed in him or her. We just don't get to be competent human beings without a lot of different investments from others."

"When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed."

"I believe that appreciation is a holy thing, that when we look for what's best in the person we happen to be with at the moment, we're doing what God does; so in appreciating our neighbor, we're participating in something truly sacred."

"Vermont is a small state which makes an enormous difference."

"It's not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It's the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff."

"It's our insides that make us who we are, that allow us to dream and wonder and feel for others. That's what's essential. That's what will always make the biggest difference in our world."

"Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we aren't perfect."

"If only you could sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person."

"As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has—or ever will have—something inside that is unique to all time. It's our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression."

"Fame is a four letter word and like tape, or zoom, or face, or pain, or life, or love, what ultimately matters is what we do with it."

"Both Joanne and I can recall many times when we wish we'd said or done something different. But we didn't, and we've learned not to feel too guilty about that. What gives me my good feelings is that we always cared and always tried to do our best."

"Children are to be respected and I respect them deeply. They've taught me an awful lot."

"This is The Tonight Show. I can't tell you too much about it, other than the fact that this program is going to go on forever."

"Get this to Grand Central Station as quick as you can!"

"Sports fans, I have the final score for you on the big game between Harvard and William & Mary. It is: Harvard 14, William 12, Mary 6."

"It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive certain individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty."

"Religious believers of the world, you are free to continue to debate the simple, narrow question that divides you from atheists, but you have no right, in so doing, to treat the Humanists of the world with contempt. You owe them a deep debt of gratitude, for not only have they shed much light on a naturally dark world but they have very probably helped civilize your own specific religion."

"Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of it: that otherwise sane and responsible citizens should devote their professional energies to causing others to make sharp, explosive barking-like exhalations."

"One social evil for which the New Testament is clearly in part responsible is anti-Semitism."

"There is not the slightest question but that the God of the Old Testament is a jealous, vengeful God, inflicting not only on the sinful pagans but even on his Chosen People fire, lightning, hideous plagues and diseases, brimstone, and other curses."

"There are hundreds of millions who believe the Messiah has come. If he did, then it is unfortunately the case that his heroic sacrifice and death have had no effect whatsoever on the very problem his coming might have been expected to address, for history demonstrates, beyond question, that we Christians have been just as dangerous, singly and en masse, as non-Christians."

"To those who wish to punish others — or at least to see them punished, if the avengers are too cowardly to take matters into their own hands — the belief in a fiery, hideous hell appears to be a great source of comfort."

"The Bible has been interpreted to justify such evil practices as, for example, slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic murders of women believed to be witches, capital punishment for hundreds of offenses, polygamy, and cruelty to animals. It has been used to encourage belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage the free teaching of scientific truths. We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism."

"Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences."

"No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity in the Bible."

"God is by definition the holder of all possible knowledge, it would be impossible for him to have faith in anything. Faith, then, is built upon ignorance and hope."

"From Bad Boy of Music, on his life as a concert pianist:"

"From Bad Boy of Music, on dealing with unruly audiences:"

"This fact, the surfacing of structure in an undeliberate action, is too big to take on here, but it was enough to convince me that the structuralists—the advocates of planning music before you hear or care what the plan gives you—were right: do not rely on unplanned music; it comes out as though it were planned, but planned by someone you cross the street to avoid."

"It's not what you've been taught - in the conservative sectors - that you have a poverty of materials. You're all healthy, you're all strong enough to make sounds until the end of time. The only problem you have is deciding whether your sound is any good. What I'm encouraging you to do is not to think about that too much, not to reevaluate the sounds, but just to examine them, and see what the structure is. See what's actually there, before you start this process of trying to ask yourself whether Nancy Reagan would like it, or Mrs. Bush. Just take the whole big first chunk, and then break it down. Follow what you know about it to where it goes... The music's there. I'm not trying to be weird, but it's there. I was taught that I didn't have anything, and it was my job to work hard and get something, and that's just not true."

"The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity I need. My name in print. That really makes somebody. Things are going to start happening to me now!"

"All of a sudden I had to remember some words that Marlowe had told me over fifteen years ago: "Dead men don't wear plaid." Hmm... Dead men don't wear plaid. I still don't know what it means."

"You kill me and I'll see that you never work in this town again."

"A kiss may not be the truth, but it is what we wish were true."

"Why is it we don't always recognize the moment when love begins, but we always know when it ends?"

"Hosting the Oscars is like making love to a beautiful woman — it's something I only get to do when Billy Crystal's out of town."

"I handed in a script last year and the studio didn't change one word. The word they didn't change was on page 87."

"It was so sweet backstage, you should have seen it — The Teamsters were helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo."

"People come up to me and say "Steve, what is film editing?" And I say "How should I know? You're the director.""

"You know, a lot of people come to me and they say: "Steve, how can you be so fucking funny?" There's a secret to it, it's no big deal. Before I go out, I put a slice of bologna in each of my shoes. So when I'm on stage, I feel funny."

"I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks."

"Now let's repeat the non-conformists' oath: I promise to be different! [audience repeats] I promise to be unique! [audience repeats] I promise not to repeat things other people say! [audience repeats, laughs] Good!"

"It's so hard to believe in anything anymore, you know what I mean? It's like, religion, you really can't take it seriously, 'cause it seems so mythological, and seems so arbitrary; and then on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. — I guess I wouldn't believe in anything if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch. [Audience member]: What's your mood watch say? Martin: Yeah, I remember when I had my first beer."

"I used to smoke marijuana. But I'll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening — or the mid-evening. Just the early evening, midevening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early mid-afternoon, or perhaps the late-midafternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning … But never at dusk! Never at dusk, I would never do that."

"Comedy is not pretty."

"Steve Martin came around for a barbecue once. I was grilling and he said, "Oh, no, I can’t have any of that." I asked why not and he said, "Sorry, I'm vegetarian." I said, "You didn’t know we are?! Everything on the grill is veggie!" He said, "Ahhh" and ate three veggie burgers and then asked where he could buy them."

"(What’s your favorite book by a comedian?) It’s a tossup between Charlie Murphy’s The Making of a Stand-Up Guy and Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. Both books capture the business incredibly well."

"They didn't understand it and I tried to make them see That one is only poor only if they choose to be Now I know we had no money but I was rich as I could be In my coat of many colors that Momma made for me Made just for me..."

"Now Momma's done away with the old black kettle she used to cook in when I was just little And the door ain't sprung on her electric range That little old farm and home we had it ain't there no more and that's too bad Folks are doing away with the simple things..."

"Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene I'm begging of you please don't take my man Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene Please don't take him just because you can"

"You can have your choice of men but I could never love again He's the only one for me Jolene I have to have this talk with you My happiness depends on you and whatever You decide to do Jolene..."

"I hope life treats you kind And I hope you have all you've dreamed of. And I wish to you, joy and happiness. But above all this, I wish you love."

"If I should stay, I would only be in your way. So I'll go, but I know I'll think of you ev'ry step of the way.And I will always love you. I will always love you."

"It's been a long dark night And I've been a waitin' for the morning It's been a long hard fight But I see a brand new day a dawning."

"I've been looking for the sunshine 'Cause I ain't seen it in so long But everything's gonna work out just fine Everything's gonna be all right That's been all wrong.'"

"I can see the light of a clear blue morning I can see the light of a brand new day I can see the light of a clear blue morning And everything's gonna be all right It's gonna be okay."

"A lot of people get all turned off by the wig, the heels, the fingernails, the whole artificial bit. I do dress kinda pretty but old-fashioned. I think maybe I dress this way partly because of the image, you know, and partly because when I was a little girl growing up in a big old poor family, this was the way that the rich folks' wives dressed, when we'd see them drivin' through in their big old cars. As for the 'real me.' Well, under this wig, my own hair is about the same length and color, and I wear it about the same. But sometimes I'll dress up in a baggy old shirt and go out with my husband in a camper or something, just havin' ourselves a good time, and nobody recognizes me."

"I just depend on a lot of prayer and meditation. I believe that without God I am nobody, but that with God, I can do anything."

"My nails are my rhythm section, when I'm writing a song all alone. Some day, I may cut an album, just me and my nails."

"It's hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world"

"The way I dress, for the most part, is how most people would dress for a costume party. It would scare most people to death to look this cheap or whore-y, but to me, I’m comfortable. The way I look was really a country girl’s idea of what glamour was. I patterned my look after the town tramp. I thought she was the prettiest thing in the world, with all that bleached hair and bright-red lipstick. People would say, ‘Oh, she’s just trash,’ and I’d think, ‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up.'"

"Even when I’m writing a modern song, I’ll find myself pulling stuff from those days before I ever left home, the days of Mama and Daddy and my grandmas and grandpas, and church days. All I ever have to do is close my eyes and just kind of go inside."

"I look so totally artificial, but I’ve always been the simplest person in the world."

"I think that if I am smart in business, it’s just that I’m smart about who I am. I know what I can, can’t, will and won’t do, and if I have to be strict about that, I will."

"Do not confuse dreams with wishes. There is a difference. Dreams are where you visualize yourself being successful at what's important to you to accomplish. Now, dreams build convictions because you work hard to pay the price to make sure that they come true. Wishes are hoping good things will happen to you, but there's no fire in your gut that causes you to put everything forth to overcome all the obstacles. So you have to dream more and never, ever, ever blame somebody else if it doesn't happen. That is in your department."

"It takes a lot of money to look this cheap."

"We [at Dollywood] don’t try to shove anything down anybody’s throat. We are very open. So many of my businesspeople and my best friends are different faiths, and I work with them, live with them, love them. The gays and lesbians, they come to our parks. I think people just know I’m a very open and accepting person. And in any religion we’re supposed to be that—we’re supposed to be kind...we’re not supposed to pass judgment. Our Bible says, ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged,’ and I believe in all those kinds of things. We’re all God’s children. No matter how we try to get to heaven, we all wanna go there. We just have our own routes to take, and that’s how I look at it."

"Now, that's some lines from the song that you and I did together. I know usually, at a memorial, people talk about somebody. Well, I'm gonna talk to you. 'Cause there is that place on the other side, and I'm certainly gonna see you there, little brother. You left a lot of people here with a lot of precious, precious memories. Everybody loved you. But I doubt that many of 'em loved you more than I did. Anyhow, I just want you to know that we all love you, we all miss you and I bet you're having a big laugh over all of us being sad and sorrowful and I know that would be the last thing you would want us to be. So, anyway, you made us happy while you were here, and we're happy that you're at peace. And I just want you to know that I will always love you. Goodbye, my sweet Leslie. See you over there."

"That's my therapy; my little guitar's my friend, And when I'm in that zone – I call it my 'God zone' – I just love that time."

"I could never do that. I don't care. I always count my blessings, more than I count my money. I don't work for money, never did. It was the art, it was the job. I loved the work. And I've done well, and I'm thankful for it."

"It is true that I look artificial, but I believe that I'm totally real. My look is really based on a country girl's idea of glam. I wasn't naturally pretty, so I make the most of anything I've got."

"Well, you should've seen me this morning before I got ready to see youǃ But I'm serious, though. I'm not, like, a natural beauty. But I can enhance it. Whatever it takes, I do. I try to make the most of everything."

"I wrote a song years ago called 'In the Good Old Days When Times Were Bad,' and it said, 'No amount of money could buy from me the memories that I have of then. But no amount of money could pay me to go back and live through it again."

"When I started writing these songs, my mom was real impressed with how I could write, writing these songs at such an early age, And she would say, 'Oh honey, go get that guitar. I want you to sing them.' And she'd say to people, 'I want you to hear this song this little thing wrote.' And so I thought, ooh, I'm getting a whole lot of attention now! So, I think that kind of encouraged it. But also, I loved the sound of that music. I loved the sound of the instruments. I loved being able to create something, and it gave me a little space, and a little world of my own that I could just live in, and be creative in."

"I guess I was about ten years old, the first time that my uncle took me to sing in front of an audience. And it was when they kept clappin' and clappin' after I had finished my song, that I thought that, you know, I felt something. I was scared, I was nervous, I'm a country little kid. But when I got that applause and got that feeling, is when I thought this is what I think I'm gonna do."

"I remember this little redheaded girl with green eyes, prettiest little thing, and I said, 'Well, what's your name?' And she said, 'Jolene.' I said, 'I love that name.' All the way back to the bus I was [singing], 'Jolene, Jolene, Jolene,' so I wouldn't forget the name."

"It wasn't meant to be. And I don't regret it. I never regretted it. I mean, it was a choice. So, you make your choices, you make your sacrifices, and I never looked back. I knew early on that I was gonna walk that road 'til God told me to stop. And I'm still walking it, and He ain't said nothing to me about quittin' yet!"

"Well, I guess I am. But I don't think of it like they do. I'm just, I'm a feminine girl. I'm a workin' girl. I think we all should be treated with respect. And if we do a good job, we should get paid for it. So, I'm all about that."

"I have so many: Merle Haggard, Elton John, Billy Joel, Paul Simon. Hank Williams is one of the greatest ever because people can take his songs and do them in any fashion. They are simple, sweet songs, but they just touch your guts and reach you wherever they want to."

"I remember feeling like all our hard work had paid off: I was going to be able to make a life in this business. I don’t remember making that much money from [“Joshua”] at that time, but I’m sure I spent it on stage clothes or my family or something like that. I remember watching it rise up the charts and thinking, “Golly, that’s such a great feeling!”"

"My guitar and my songwriting: That’s my therapy; that’s my doctors, my nurses, my medicine. I really think my music has saved me — and saved a lot of other people because I’m able to write the feelings of people who are broken and don’t know how to express it. I can do it for them, and it really seems to help. It is wonderful when you’re going through hurt to be able to write about it."

"When I heard that huge production with Whitney’s voice, my gosh, who could even sing better than that? And David Foster’s arrangement overwhelmed me. I would have never in a million years believed that my little heartfelt song could have turned into one of the biggest love songs of all time. I was never so proud in my life as a songwriter to think that my little song could be that good and that big."

"I don’t really realize it until it’s already said. I just answer from my heart when somebody asks me a direct question. I love everybody. And, of course, Black lives matter. We all matter. We’re all God’s children. I hope people learn to love one another a little more than they do, and if I can be any help in that respect, then I hope to be."

"I think I’m a star to everybody but me, I always wanted to be famous, but nobody could have thought of the extent it became. I’ll see a whole wall of my pictures somewhere, and I’ll wonder ‘How did that happen?’ It’s more a joy than a surprise."

"I’ll go into a closet and wonder, ‘Now, what in the hell did I come in here for?', There’s nothing that makes me happier than writing a song."

"I think the one that’s most personal to me is the lil’ 'Coat of Many Colors,' because it talks about my mom, my parents, and kind of gives you an insight. It also covers bullying, acceptance and all that."

"I’ve been grateful for every good thing ever happened, God has always blessed me, surrounded me with good people. I pray that every day God will bring all the right things, all the right people, into my life."

"I’ve been at this so long, I’ve worn some of the most bizarre things – my hairdos have always been so out there, At the time you think you look good, then you look back on it, like, what was I thinking?"

"I’ve always been true to myself,” she says. “That was what my mama always used to say: to thine own self be true. I put a lot of stock in that. Everything I do, whether it’s my personality, how I conduct myself and business, or whatever, if I do it my way, according to what I understand and believe, there’s a strength in that. You can think, ‘I can stand by this, I can live by this."

"I think words and titles just have such connotations, When I think about a ‘feminist’, you think about women that are anti-men, and you think of women that have been so mistreated, they have to make some sort of a statement. I’m all about women, I’m all about empowering women, but I’m all about empowering all people – love and respect and uplifting [them]."

"Even within my own family, especially the last few years since Trump and Biden, all that, it’s like we can’t even go to a family dinner any more. Especially if people are drinking – they get in a damn fight at the table."

"This is amazing to me how people look to me, that’s a big responsibility. There ain’t nobody that good. I’m not all that. I make a joke – I’m not even all there. I try to just be a decent human being, try to use love as my great tool and weapon. I try to leave my heart, my eyes, my ears open, and my mouth closed, when I know it’s not the right thing to be doing."

"I’m almost 78 years old. When you get older, you see everything, you’ve been through everything, and you can take a new spin on something that might have been right for you 10, 15 years ago."

"My joke [is that] if I have any regrets, it’s that I got caught with some of the stuff that I had no regret about."

"In January 2025, Dolly shared, "I think I'm a star to everybody but me... I always wanted to be famous, but nobody could have thought of the extent it became."

"Following the death of her husband in March 2025, Dolly released the song "If You Hadn't Been There," expressing gratitude for his unwavering support throughout their nearly 60-year marriage"

"Due to health challenges, Dolly postponed her December 2025 Las Vegas residency. She humorously referred to it as her "100,000-mile check-up," clarifying it wasn’t related to cosmetic surgery."

"In October 2025, Dolly reassured fans about her health, saying, "I don’t think God is through with me... I ain't done working." She humorously added, "I ain't ready to die yet.""

"In a 2024 interview with The Guardian, Dolly addressed speculation about her retirement, stating, "I can’t retire. I always say I’ve dreamed myself into a corner. I’ve got to keep all those dreams alive. Every dream spins off into something else.""

"Dolly’s big in Iceland. Her voice is immaculate, really powerful. Her character is so warm and human, and she has a great sense of humor. All my friends love Dolly, and most of them are people who would never listen to country music. It doesn’t happen very often when you get a character that is sort of larger than life. I don’t like rock music, but I like Kurt Cobain. He could be playing any style of music and I would have been interested. You know? And I think Dolly is like that. She is an incredible singer, an incredible songwriter."

"I met Dolly Parton in Tennessee; her titties were filled with Hennessy. That country music really drove me crazy, but I rode that ass and said, "Yes, Miss Daisy!""

"There's a lot of difference between songwriting and poetry, and I think that's what gets lost. Most lyrics do not read well. They sing well...I'll tell you who writes well, though, as I'm sure you're aware, and that's Dolly, Dolly Parton."

"it takes guts to be a woman under patriarchy. I mean, Dolly Parton is like an image of a super-femme, but she has this certain brassiness, she just has to have total guts to survive around men and to have her image be so female. She's the kind of person that a drag queen would emulate, because she is using that female, or femme facade, which is like Marlene Dietrich or Mae West or Dolly Parton or any of those gutsy women over the years who drag queens have chosen to emulate, especially the ones who do female impersonation. There's the other edge to them besides the femme facade that is totally gutsy and a real survivor of the world"

"This will sound crazy, but when I was interviewing Dolly Parton, I almost felt like she had healing powers."

"She seemed astonishingly unaffected. It was a bizarre contrast. She looks like a totally artificial creation, with the amazing blond wig and the 6-inch skyscraper heels and the bosom that makes her, no doubt, the unchallenged record holder and defending champion at Frederick's of Hollywood. Then she walks up to you and says, "Hi! I'm Dolly Parton!" The introduction is as unnecessary as if, say, John Wayne had walked up and said, "Hi! I'm John Wayne!" What is the proper response? "Yes, of course you are”? Dolly Parton spent about half an hour shaking everybody's hand and leaving behind a wake of people telling each other, "Gee, she's really nice," as if, well, as if somehow she shouldn't have been. There is a way in which we behave in public, in situations with a lot of strangers that implies a level of polite, subtle hostility. We are reserved. We check out the room for traps and hazards. We are uncomfortable, confronted with a hundred unfamiliar faces. What Dolly did was to come in with her brash, unaffected personality and sweep away all that paranoia in a rush of good will. It left everybody standing around afterward feeling a little goofy."

"His partitioning of the octave in the first ten bars places Varèse with Scriabin and the Schoenberg circle among the revolutionary composers whose work initiates the beginning of a new mainstream tradition in the music of our century."

"Do we really have to look these chords up in Forte's catalog in order to find a name for them? Another theorist [Christopher Hasty] assures us that, 'Allen Forte's perceptive interpretation...accounts for an essential quality of this mysteriously pulsating music. The eighth-note chords of the flute and clarinets form alternately, with the sustaining oboes and horns, the six-tone sonorities labeled A and B. The sonorities A and B are both representatives of the same set class (6-Z19) and are thus made up of precisely the same intervals. As Forte points out, "There is a flucuation of pitch-class content while interval content remains constant."' 'A fluctuation of pitch-class content while interval content remains constant' is what the rest of us have always known as 'a transposition.'"

"The crucial and monumental development in the art music of our century has been the qualitative change in the foundational premises of our musical language--the change from a highly chromaticized tonality whose principle functions and operations are still based on a limited selection, the seven notes of the diatonic scale, from the universal set of twelve pitch classes to a scale that comprehends the total pitch-class content of that universal set. We can point to the moment of that change with some precision. It occurs most obviously in the music of Scriabin and the Vienna circle, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, in 1909-1910, and very soon afterwards, though less obviously, in the music of Bartok and Stravinsky. I think it is safe to say that nothing of comparable significance for music has ever occurred, because the closing of the circle of fifths gives us a symmetrical collection of all twelve pitch classes that eliminates the special structural function of the perfect fifth itself, which has been the basis of every real musical system that we have hitherto known."

"By the time of his Fourth String Quartet, inversional symmetry had become as fundamental a premise of Bartók's harmonic language as it is of the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Neither he nor they ever realized that this connection establishes a profound affinity between them in spite of the stylistic features that so obviously distinguish his music from theirs...Nowhere does he [Bartók] recognize the communality of his harmonic language with that of the twelve-tone composers that is implied in their shared premise of the harmonic equivalence of inversionally symmetrical pitch-class relations."

"I would not want you to suppose that my rejection of Allen Forte's theory of pitch-class sets implies a rejection of the notion that there can be such a thing as a pitch-class set. It is only when one defines everything in terms of pitch-class sets that the concept becomes meaningless."

"Z-relation, or rather, "that certain pitch-class collections share the same 'interval vector' even though they are neither transpositionally nor inversionally equivalent was first pointed out by Howard Hanson in Harmonic Materials of Modern Music (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1960), p. 22, and by David Lewin in "Re: The Intervallic Content of a Collection of Notes," Journal of Music Theory 4:1 (1960). For a general criticism of Forte's concepts of pitch-class set equivalence see Perle, "Pitch-Class Set Analysis: An Evaluation," Journal of Musicology 8:2 (1990)."

"This intersecting of inherently non-symmetrical diatonic elements with inherently non-diatonic symmetrical elements seems to me the defining principle of the musical language of Le Sacre and the source of the unparalleled tension and conflicted energy of the work."

"The achievement of such a change of register through a sequential progression is a familiar procedure in the music of the "common practice." The significant distinction is that where Berg subdivides the registral span into equal, i.e., cyclic, intervals, his tonal predecessors subdivide it, in changing register through sequential transference, into the unequal intervals of the diatonic scale. As I pointed out in my last lecture, however, the qualitative transformation in the language of music which we have experienced in our century has a long prehistory. Beginning with Schubert, we occasionally find normal diatonic functions questioned in changes of key that progress along the intervals of the whole-tone scale, or the diminished-7th chord, or the augmented triad. An even more radical example of a cyclic progression in a tonal composition is...from Wagner (Die Walkure, Act III)."

"If...[Alban] Berg departs so radically from tradition, through his substitution of a symmetrical partitioning of the octave for the asymmetrical partitionings of the major/minor system, he departs just as radically from the twelve-tone tradition that is represented in the music of Schoenberg and Webern, for whom the twelve-tone series was always an integral structure that could be transposed only as a unit, and for whom twelve-tone music always implied a constant and equivalent circulation of the totality of pitch classes."

"Collections of all twelve pitch classes can be differentiated from one another only by assigning an order to the pitch classes or by partitioning them into mutually exclusive sub-collections. The ordering principle is the basis of the twelve-tone system formulated by Schoenberg, the partitioning principle the basis of the system formulated around the same time by Hauer. In Schoenberg's compositional practice, however, the concept of a segmental pitch-class content is represented as well, as a basis for the association of paired inversionally related set forms. On the relation between Schoenberg and Hauer see Bryan R. Simms, "Who First Composed Twelve-Tone Music, Schoenberg or Hauer?" Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute X/2 (November 1987)."

"Every bit of theorizing I’ve ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer. I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing."

"I hope it is clear...that the ways in which pitches represent pitch classes, and the ways pitch classes abstract pitch, must be examined in order to describe any kind of musical sense or progression, and that if one steps back into abstracted considerations derived without respect to such concerns, an understanding of the qualities of musical uniqueness will continue to be suppressed in favor of generalizations, which at best evoke a vague sense of what a piece may be doing, perhaps in common with some other pieces, but not what one piece is doing, all by itself."

"We all have ability. The difference is how we use it."

"Sometimes I think I would love to see … just to see the beauty of flowers and trees and birds and the earth and grass. … Being as I've never seen, I don't know what it's like to see. So in a sense I'm complete. Maybe I'd be incomplete if I did see. Maybe I'd see some things that I didn't want to see … the beauty of the earth compared to the destruction of man. You see, it's one thing when you are blind from birth, and you don't know what it's like to see, anyway, so it is just like seeing. The sensation of seeing is not one that I have and not one that I worry about."

"Most cassettes are afraid of me."

"I've been a vegan for two years, so that's helped my already good-looking self. I think that eating healthy is important. … We have to be about making our planet more greener, the urban areas more sustainable for the children. We can't just talk about it, we have to be about it. … I'm motivating people to do something about how we are living on this planet. … You know it is only possible to be able to have the blessing of song through the fact that God has given me life. And the only way we can have life is by perpetuating life in how we live."

"What I’ve not heard is a unanimous commitment to atone for the sins of this country... I know that dance. I've heard those songs. It was an 18-year fight to (make) Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday... Yet it was a fight I was not willing to lose... Systemic racism can have an ending. Police brutality can have an ending. Economic repression of Black and brown people can have an ending... A movement without action is a movement standing still. To those who say they care: Move more than your mouth. Move your feet to the polls, and use your hands to vote... Black lives do matter. And this is not another digital, viral trend, moment or hashtag, Yes, all lives do matter, but they only matter when black lives matter too."

"Baby, everything is alright, Uptight, outta sight!"

"My Cherie Amour, pretty little one that I adore You're the only girl my heart beats for How I wish that you were mine."

"For once in my life I have someone who needs me, Someone I needed so long."

"For once in my life I won’t let sorrow hurt me, Not like it’s hurt me before, oh For once I have something I know won't desert me ‘Cause I’m not alone anymore."

"Like a fool I went and stayed too long, Now I'm wondering if your love's still strong, Ooh, baby, here I am, Signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours!"

"But, very well, I believe I know you very well, Wish that you knew me too, very well, And I think I can deal with everything going through your head."

"When the summer came you were not around, Now the summer's gone and love cannot be found, Where were you when I needed you last winter, my love?"

"I'm happier than the morning sun, And that's the way you said that it would be, If I should ever bring you inside my life."

"You are the sunshine of my life, That's why I'll always be around, You are the apple of my eye, Forever you'll stay in my heart."

"I feel like this is the beginning, Though I've loved you for a million years, And if I thought our love was ending, I'd find myself drowning in my own tears."

"Very superstitious, Writings on the wall, Very superstitious, Ladder's 'bout to fall, Thirteen month old baby, Broke the looking glass, Seven years of bad luck, The good things in your past."

"When you believe in things that you don't understand, Then you suffer, Superstition ain't the way."

"I believe when I fall in love with you It will be forever."

"But what I'd like to know, Is could a place like this Exist so beautiful? Or do we have to find our wings and fly away To the visions in our mind?"

"A boy is born in hard time Mississippi, Surrounded by four walls that ain't so pretty, His parents give him love and affection, To keep him strong, moving in the right direction, Living just enough, just enough for the city."

"Her brother's smart, he's got more sense than many, His patience long, but soon he won't have any, To find a job is like a haystack needle, 'Cause where he lives, they don't use coloured people, Living just enough, just enough for the city."

"To see the heaven in your eyes is not so far, 'Cause I'm not afraid to try and go it, To know the love and beauty never known before, I'll leave it up to you to show it."

"I'm so darn glad he let me try it again, 'Cause my last time on earth I lived a whole world of sin, I'm so glad that I know more than I knew then, Gonna keep on trying until I reach my highest ground."

"But don't you worry 'bout a thing, Don't you worry 'bout a thing, mama, 'Cause I'll be standing in the side when you check it out."

"He's a man with a plan, Got a counterfeit dollar in his hand, He's misstra know-it-all."

"'Where is your God?' That's what my friends ask me, And I say it's taken him so long 'Cause we've got so far to come."

"And I can't go on this way, With it stronger every day, But being too shy to say That I really love you."

"I like to see you boogie right across the floor, I'd like to do it to you 'til you howl for more, I like to reggae, but you dance too fast for me, I'd like to make love to you so you can make me scream."

"'Cause we are sick and tired of hearing your song, Telling us how you are gonna change right from wrong, 'Cause if you really want to hear our views, You haven't done nothin'."

"No more lying friends wanting tragic ends, Though they do pretend, They won't go when I go."

"And I'll go where I've longed to go, So long, away from tears."

"Love's in need of love today, Don't delay, send yours in right away, Hate's going 'round breaking many hearts, Stop it please, before it's gone too far."

"Would you like to go with me Down my dead end street? Would you like to come with me To village ghetto land?"

"Music is a world within itself With a language we all understand, With an equal opportunity For all to sing, dance and clap their hands."

"Well there's Basie, Miller, Satchmo And the king of all, Sir Duke, And with a voice like Ella's ringing out, There's no way the band can lose."

"Looking back on when I was a little nappy-headed boy, Then my only worry was for Christmas, what would be my toy? Even though we sometimes would not get a thing, We were happy with the joy the day would bring."

"I wish those days could come back once more, Why did those days ever have to go?"

"They've been spending most their lives Living in a pastime paradise. They've been spending most their lives Living in a pastime paradise. They've been wasting most their time Glorifying days long gone behind, They've been wasting most their days In remembrance of ignorance oldest praise."

"As around the sun the earth knows she's revolving, And the rosebuds know to bloom in early May, Just as hate knows love's the cure, You can rest your mind assured, That I'll be loving you always."

"For you, there might be a brighter star, But through my eyes the light of you burns all I see. For you, there might be another song, But all my heart can hear is your melody."

"Goin' back to Saturn where the rings all glow, Rainbow, moonbeams and orange snow, On Saturn, people live to be two hundred and five, Goin' back to Saturn where the people smile, Don't need cars 'cause we've learned to fly, On Saturn, just to live to us is our natural high."

"You took me riding in your rocket and gave me a star, But at a half a mile from heaven You dropped me back down to this cold, cold world."

"Everyone's feeling pretty, It's hotter than july, Though the world's full of problems, They couldn't touch us even if they tried."

"Didn't know that you Would be jammin' until the break of dawn, See nobody ever told you that you Would be jammin' until the break of dawn."

"Well I'm a man of many wishes, Hope my premonition misses, But what I really feel, My eyes won't let me hide, 'Cause they always start to cry, 'Cause this time could mean goodbye."

"You know it doesn't make much sense, There ought to be a law against Anyone who takes offence At a day in your celebration, 'Cause we all know in our minds That there ought to be a time That we can set aside To show just how much we love you, And I'm sure you would agree, What could fit more perfectly Than to have a world party On the day you came to be? Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, Happy birthday."

"I just called to say I love you, I just called to say how much I care, I just called to say I love you, And I mean it from the bottom of my heart."

"Call up, ring once, hang up the phone, To let me know you made it home, Don't want nothing to be wrong, With part-time lover."

"We are undercover passion on the run, Chasing love up against the sun, We are strangers by day, lovers by night, Knowing it's so wrong but feeling so right."

"And though you don't believe that they do, They do come true, For did my dreams Come true when I looked at you, And maybe too if you would believe, You too might be overjoyed, over love, over me."

"Raindrops, passionate raindrops, The kind of rain that writes 'They're so in love' on our skin. Raindrops, that we hope won't stop Cooling the red hot love that we are making."

"Shame on me, shame on you, Shame on them, shame on us, Shame on me, shame on you, Shame on them, shame on us, So what the fuss."

"I don't know what life would be like without music. In my lonely times, music has been my closest friend. It has also been my doctor-and my lover, in the sense that I sometimes listen to music and dream of a lover that doesn't exist. Late at night, when I don't feel sleepy, I'll play music-all types of music and lose myself in its mystery. I might decide to play Stevie Wonder, or Debussy, or Tchaikovsky. It depends on my mood."

"As Stevie Wonder says in his song (It will take a long time before white America can understand what his music is about at all; it's almost like a code. They don't really know what Stevie is singing about or what Stevie is saying. They can't afford to know.) Stevie says, "I ain't gotta do nothing to you; I ain't even gotta do nothing to you; you cause your own country to fall." And that's what's happening."

"Stevie Wonder delivered an emphatic, at times impatient video message Tuesday urging on the Black Lives Matter movement. Saying he has listened to "voices on the left, voices on the right," Wonder added, "What I’ve not heard is a unanimous commitment to atone for the sins of this country."... Wonder lamented that three states — North Dakota, South Dakota and Hawaii — have failed to formally recognize Juneteenth as a holiday. "... It was an 18-year fight to (make) Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday," said Wonder, who teamed with late U.S. Rep. John Conyers in that ultimately successful campaign... The short video, titled "The Universe is Watching Us," was posted to Wonder's social media channels Tuesday afternoon."

"And most of all, I'd like to thank Stevie Wonder, who didn't make an album this year."

"So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it's gratifying to have something you have done linger in people's memories."

"There’s a very basic human, non-verbal aspect to our need to make music and use it as part of our human expression. It doesn’t have to do with body movements, it doesn't have to do with articulation of a language, but with something spiritual."

"I hadn't heard of either disco or Meco. When I was asked to listen to Meco's now-famous recording, I was a little apprehensive, wondering how a pop record could be made from "The March from Star Wars" and what it would be like. I immediately liked what I heard and sensed that a genuine communication was taking place. Meco took things forward another step by bringing Star Wars to a vast audience who otherwise would not have heard it in its original symphonic setting. I am most grateful to Meco for all of this and I am delighted that 'disco' and 'Meco' are now household words."

"Leroy Anderson is an American original - direct, honest, personal, idiosyncratic, and free of pretension. His music is directed to, and reflective of, the American soul."

"Without John Williams, bikes don’t really fly, nor do brooms in Quidditch matches, nor do men in red capes. There is no Force, dinosaurs do not walk the Earth, we do not wonder, we do not weep, we do not believe."

"An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker — the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art."

"Market value is irrelevant to intrinsic value. … Unqualified judgment can at most claim to decide the market-value — a value that can be in inverse proportion to the intrinsic value."

"Although our "gentle air" cannot improve the way hate and envy look, it does seem not to encourage firmness and decision. All is compromise; caution and refinement are everywhere. Everything has to "make a good impression" — whether or not it is any good: the impression is the main thing."

"I have just read your book [On the Spiritual in Art] from cover to cover, and I will read it once more. I find it pleasing to an extraordinary degree, because we agree on nearly all of the main issues.."

"Now we will throw these mediocre kitsch-mongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God."

"There are no more geniuses, only critics."

"Hauer looks for laws. Good. But he looks for them where he will not find them."

"I find above all that the expression, "atonal music," is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying "the art of not falling," or swimming "the art of not drowning.""

"If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears…"

"My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers."

"I see the work as a whole first. Then I compose the details. In working out, I always lose something. This cannot be avoided. There is always some loss when we materialize. But there is compensating gain in vitality."

"There is a great Man living in this country — a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives."

"...if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art."

"I believe that he (Strauss) will remain one of the characteristic and outstanding figures in musical history. Works like Salome, Elektra and Intermezzo, and others will not perish."

"I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes."

"My music is not lovely."

"My music is not modern, it is merely badly played"

""My works are 12-tone compositions, not 12-tone compositions"

"I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!""

"I am delighted to add another unplayable work to the repertoire."

"A regular Friday audience, 90 percent feminine and 100 percent well-bred, sat stoically yesterday through thirty minutes of the most cacophonous world premiere ever heard here - the first performance anywhere of a new Violin Concerto by Arnold Schoenberg. Yesterday's piece combines the best sound effects of a hen yard at feeding time, a brisk morning in Chinatown and practice hour at a busy music conservatory. The effect on the vast majority of hearers is that of a lecture on the fourth dimension delivered in Chinese."

"In your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my painting."

"At the moment there is a great tendency in painting to discover the 'new' harmony by constructive means whereby the rhythmic is built on an almost geometric form.. .I am certain that our own modern harmony is not to be found in the 'geometric' way, but rather in the anti-geometric, anti-logical way. And this way is that of 'dissonance in art', in painting, therefore, just as much as in music. And 'today's' dissonance in painting and music is merely the consonance of 'tomorrow'."

"[Schonberg's] music leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone, and at this point the music of the future begins."

"Can you imagine a music in which tonality (that is, the adherence to any key) is completely suspended? I was constantly reminded of Kandinsky's large composition which also permits no trace of tonality.. ..and also of Igor Kandinsky's 'jumping spots' in hearing this music [of Schoenberg], which allows each tone sounded to stand on its own (a kind of white canvas between the spots of color). Schoenberg proceeds from the principle that the concepts of consonance and dissonance do not exist at all. A so-called dissonance is only a more remote consonance – an idea which now occupies me constantly while painting.. - note 6"

"In fact, the influence of Schoenberg may be overwhelming on his followers, but the significance of his art is to be identified with influences of a more subtle kind - not the system, but the aesthetic, of his art. I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written."

"Richard Strauss on Schoenberg, written by Schoenberg himself: "Dear Sir, I regret that I am unable to accept your invitation to write something for Richard Strauss's fiftieth birthday. In a letter to Frau Mahler (in connection with Mahler Memorial Fund) Herr Strauss wrote about me as follows: 'The only person who can help poor Schoenberg now is a psychiatrist ...". "I think he'd do better to shovel snow instead of scribbling on music-paper...'"

"The pre-World War I works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, "give a glimpse of a new universe of emancipated discourse, unfortunately quickly abandoned when Schoenberg returned to the classical musical shapes upon adopting the twelve-tone system.""

"I'm very concerned with the performer, but I'm not too concerned with the listener. It seems to me that if you can interest the performer and make him feel that he's done something really valuable, his playing will convince the audience just that. To write for the audience is just too uncertain. You never know what your audience may be like, but you can usually know what your performers will be like. A good musician has the training to appreciate all sorts of things you might try to do in a piece. A performer will also recognize whether a piece is skillfully written or original -- an audience might not always be so sure."

"People call my music complex because I will have instruments playing at their own paces, as if the other instruments weren't even there. It doesn't march along in the same way that most older music does. But to me, I honestly don't think that a work like Debussy's La Mer is any less complex than my work. It's full of all sorts of sounds and textures going on at once, yet we still look at is as beautiful, structured and fluid. That's all I'm trying to do; I'm not out to compose for complexity's sake."

"I think more audiences would like contemporary music if they were presented with it, told about it. It's just a matter of familiarity, I think. Then one begins to look back at old music as stuffy, or even tiresome. It's funny -- I'm beginning to like older music more than I used to, but it's like I'm going into a museum and contemplating a Rembrandt. It just feels like its part of the aristocratic class system of kings and queens and dukes which just doesn't exist anymore."

"When people listen to my music, I hope that they will notice that if you take a piece by a composer like Schubert, the major and the minor triad is an extremely important thing not merely as harmony, but in creating melodic lines. Schubert is always walking up and down with arpeggios on C, E, G and so forth. I am not doing anything different really, except using a different system of harmony."

"In the future (...) people will become more sensitive and aware than they are now. They will have to, because society will become more complicated, more full of people, with more different things happening. People will have to become much cleverer and much sharper. Then they will like my music."

"I got myself into a lovely little—shall we say controversy—with André Breton, by pointing out that the discipline of spontaneity, which he was asking his surrealist neophytes to adopt, was new for language but something that composers had been practicing for centuries."

"I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That's when I was born."

"l'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used all the time at the time, and I kept thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes but I couldn't play it. ... I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive."

"Any musician who says he is playing better either on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain, straight liar. When I get too much to drink, I can't even finger well, let alone play decent ideas. ... You can miss the most important years of your life, the years of possible creation."

"Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."

"Don't play the saxophone. Let it play you."

"You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail."

"Bird Lives!"

"I want to say something about Charlie Parker, his importance in the picture. As great as we all think Bud Powell is, where would he be without Bird. He's the first one that should remember it—he himself told me that Bird showed him the way to a means of expression. shows a good deal of personality, but it's still a take-off on Parker. You take Groovin' High, or pick at random any five records by well-known boppers, and compare the ideas and phrases. You'll see that if Charlie Parker wanted to invoke plagiarism laws, he could sue almost anyone who's made a record in the last 10 years. If I were Bird, I've have all the best boppers in the country thrown into jail."

"Bird's mind and fingers work with incredible speed. He can imply four chord changes in a melodic pattern where another musician would have trouble inserting two."

"If that wasn't Bird, I quit ... You know what's funny? Now I know that Bird was progressing still. The other cats were the ones that were standing still and making Bird sound old, you know? Bird isn't just playing riffs on here, the way his imitators do. You know how he used to be able to talk with his horn, the way he could tell you what chick he was thinking about? That's the way he's playing here. How many stars? FIFTY!"

"It sounded like a member of the Charlie Parker school. I've never liked that school—it's one of those out-of-tune, honking-type things..."

"I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around."

"During 1945, we used to go down almost every night to catch Diz and Bird wherever they were playing. We felt that if we missed hearing them play, we were missing something important. Man, the shit they were playing and doing was going down so fast, you just had to be there in person to catch it."

"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that […] if that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws."

"I’m not aware of it. I don’t pay much attention to his tweets. I’ll say this for ya: He’s been one of the best presidents I’ve served under. And the reasoning is, he’s not afraid to make decisions. He’s not afraid to take on the big mouths around here."

"…Senator Hatch taught us that an abusive tax system is particularly dangerous for freedom of religion or belief. Religious and spiritual movements are vulnerable, and ideologically motivated bureaucrats can do much damage to them. Tax reform and the defense of freedom of religion or belief are inseparable."

"Perhaps the Russians have done the right thing, after all, in abolishing copyright. It is well known that conscious and unconscious appropriation, borrowing, adapting, plagiarizing, and plain stealing are variously, and always have been, part and parcel of the process of artistic creation. The attempt to make sense out of copyright reaches its limit in folk song. For here is the illustration par excellence of the law of Plagiarism. The folk song is, by definition and, as far as we can tell, by reality, entirely a product of plagiarism."

"In 'pure' instrumental music, the strategies chosen by composers to create unity were responsive to the tenets of Romanticism...Even in the absence of an explicit program, motivic continuity created a kind of narrative coherence. Like the chief character in a novel, the 'fortunes' of the main motive--its development, variation, and encounters with other 'protagonists'--served as a source of constancy throughout the unfolding of the musical process."

"Because of the variables and the complexity of their interaction, the data assembled by descriptive musicology yield relatively few observable regularities."

"I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, Just like the ones I used to know."

"It's February the 22nd And I can't tell a lie."

"Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music."

"While I was working on Downward Spiral, I was living in the house where Sharon Tate was killed. Then one day I met her sister. It was a random thing, just a brief encounter. And she said: "Are you exploiting my sister's death by living in her house?" For the first time, the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said, "No, it's just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I'm in this place where a weird part of history occurred." I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don't want to support. When she was talking to me, I realized for the first time, "What if it was my sister?" I thought, "Fuck Charlie Manson." I went home and cried that night. It made me see there's another side to things, you know?"

"I think, fundamentally music is something inherently people love and need and relate to, and a lot of what's out right now feels like McDonalds. It's quick-fix. You kind of have a stomachache afterwards. It's not wholly satisfying. And it's fake. I would hope that the music that inspired me, that got me going, that talked to me, felt like it was coming from some place that had some true emotion and true integrity behind it. I think that can reemerge."

"God money I'll do anything for you. God money just tell me what you want me to. God money nail me up against the wall. God money don't want everything he wants it all."

"Head like a hole, Black as your soul. I'd rather die than give you control."

"Bow down before the one you serve; You're going to get what you deserve."

"You let me violate you. You let me desecrate you. You let me penetrate you. You let me complicate you. Help me, I broke apart my insides. Help me, I've got no soul to sell. Help me; the only thing that works for me. Help me get away from myself.I want to fuck you like an animal. I want to feel you from the inside. I want to fuck you like an animal. My whole existence is flawed. You get me closer to God."

"I hurt myself today To see if I still feel. I focus on the pain, the only thing that's real."

"What have I become, My sweetest friend? Everyone I know Goes away in the end. You could have it all, My empire of dirt. I will let you down; I will make you hurt."

"Rushin' Lullaby."

"[T]he main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe. That's what music is to me—it's just another way of saying this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that's been given to us, and here's an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is. That's what I would like to do. I think that's one of the greatest things you can do in life, and we all try to do it in some way. The musician's is through his music."

"Keep a thing happenin' all throughout."

"Q: What would you like to be in 10 years? A: I'd like to be a saint."

"I thought about this question. I answered it as best I could [at the press conference]. I felt I didn't tell [the reporter] what I really wanted to say. He thought I was Christian. And I am by birth; my parents were and my early teachings were Christian. But as I look upon the world, I feel all men know the truth. If a man was a Christian, he could know the truth and he could not. The truth itself does not have any name on it. And each man has to find it for himself, I think."

"My goal is to live the truly religious life and express it in my music. If you live it, when you play there's no problem because the music is just part of the whole thing. To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am—my faith, my knowledge, my being."

"John [Coltrane] was like a visitor to this planet. He came in peace and he left in peace; but during his time here, he kept trying to reach new levels of awareness, of peace, of spirituality. That's why I regard the music he played as spiritual music — John's way of getting closer and closer to the Creator."

"I was playing this concert, and when I finished a solo, I backed offstage. There was Coltrane with the lights behind him, beatified. He held out his arms and took me in and I wept like a child. I'd been through so much, and held so much in, but I didn't cry until Coltrane told me it was alright."

"I think the most interesting thing about Coltrane, besides his tone and his sense of improvisation, was his deep spiritual centre. You really felt his relationship with God in his playing."

"...you pick up the saxophone again, I suppose it's like writing poetry, you are picking up the history of that. Playing saxophone is like honoring a succession of myths. I never thought of this before but: the myth of saxophone and here comes Billie Holiday and there's Coltrane. I love his work dearly, especially "A Love Supreme." That song has fed me. And all of that becomes. When you play you're a part of that, you have to recognize those people."

"[W]hen I was with him, he was as straight as a pin, but he had this sugar addiction and he loved these butter rum lifesavers. So he'd be pop—when he didn't have the horn in his mouth, he would be popping these lifesavers in, which satisfied his sugar craving, I guess. But he always had that... his breath always smelled of butter rum lifesavers."

"Much of what the jazz-rock and fusion players would do in the 70s used Coltrane's modal and rhythmic frameworks as a model."

"You know, John Coltrane has been sort of a god to me. Seems like, in a way, he didn't get the inspiration out of other musicians. He had it. When you hear a cat do a thing like that, you got to go along with him. I think I heard Coltrane before I really got close to Miles [Davis]. Miles had a tricky way of playing his horn that I didn't understand as much as I did Coltrane. I really didn't understand what Coltrane was doing, but it was so exciting the thing that he was doing..."

"Eventually I became a tad compulsive about hearing certain songs. At first it was a handful of jazz classics-Miles Davis's "Freddie Freeloader," John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," Frank Sinatra's "Luck Be a Lady.""

"A titanic force behind tenor and soprano saxophones during his four decades on this planet, John Coltrane was relentless in his pursuit as musician. Constantly crafting his technique, he supposedly practiced sometimes ten to twelve hours a day, including after gigs or between sets. While there's some great material on his early Prestige recordings, his watershed album Giant Steps for Atlantic was monumental. His Impulse! records with his classic quartet of McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones are some of finest discs he released, including A Love Supreme and Crescent. Coltrane influenced countless musicians and his presence is even heard in younger players today."

"In short, [Coltrane's] tone is beautiful because it is functional. In other words, it is always involved in saying something. You can't separate the means that a man uses to say something from what he ultimately says. Technique is not separated from its content in a great artist."

"I mostly like things that have causes more than effects, and this seemed to be a tune that is mostly effects. I don't get the cause clearly."

"Let's play the music and not the background!"

"I wasn't so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That's why I'm broke."

"The only thing my mother would say about my music—I'd say, "Mom, listen to this," and she'd say, "Junior, I know who you are.""

"Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played nigth after night but differently each time."

"When people like and John Lewis, whose musicianship I respect, back and support this so openly and fervently, I don't know what to think. I just can't figure it out. From the very first note it's miserably out of tune. [...] I should like to revise one rating. After hearing "Embraceable You" by the Ornette Coleman group, I'd like to raise the rating on ' "Midnight Sun Never Sets" to 12!"

"When asked to play a 12-bar blues, Ornette Coleman fingered his plastic saxophone and played nothing...he's felt more nothing than you or I know."

"I like Ornette's approach to writing. I wish I could see more of a link between the writing and the solos. It's like a building without any foundation and something's got to keep it up in the air. Even an atom-powered submarine has to go back to home base sometimes ... You've got to know where home is. You've got to acknowledge that somewhere."

"In my estimation a very important date, along with some of Ornette's earlier dates. It was very important insofar as the direction of the music; jazz, specifically the avant-garde ... Ornette inspired me to move from the canal-like narrow-mindedness of the '40s through the later '50s, to the later Grand Canyon-like harmonic awareness of the '60s ... I think he might have had some bearing on Newk Rollins and the impeccable John Coltrane."

"Whichever alto player it was, I wish he would play in tune. He's got good ideas, but it would help to get them across a little more, you know, if ... unless that's considered to be a little bit more freedom—if you can take liberties with the intonation like that. if that's liberty, boy, they're making an ass out of Abraham Lincoln! I think it would be a good idea for everybody to just leave Ornette alone for about five years and let him get himself together rather than subject him to all the controversail ends of it ... he's searching and he should at least have the liberty to do it in peace."

"There's two driving forces for every jazz player—the playing and the writing ... Ornette's writing was a little bit ahead of his playing when this record was made. He has a wonderful sense of humor, and the compositions are very interesting. But I don't think he plays his compositions as well as he wrote them."

"I'm in favor of Ornette and many of the things he has done ... he does possess the basic elements that go to make up a jazz artist ... a rhythmic drive ... qualities you can find in everybody since Louis Armstrong—all the good guys ... I can still see in his figures a certain quality that was exemplified by Bird. Everybody says Ornette's playing sounds weird or so forth. But the basic jazz essentials, as I said ... Ornette has—the drive and the rhythm. Rhythm is the most necessary part, the prerequisite for the jazz musician—the positive element. But, of course, harmony is the negative through which the positive must exert itself."

"His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering a saxophone. Such practical 'limitations' did not even have to be overcome in his music; they somehow never existed for him. Despite this--or more accurately, because of this--his playing has a deep inner logic. Not an obvious surface logic, it is based on subtleties of reaction, subtleties of timing and color that are, I think, quite new to jazz--at least they have never appeared in so pure and direct a form."

"With his 1959 Atlantic debut, The Shape of Jazz to Come, alto player Ornette Coleman helped usher in free jazz and avant-garde jazz. Recording without piano helped liberate the songs of a recognizable chord structure and his harmolodics philosophy sought to to free musical compositions from any tonal center. Coleman also used somewhat inventive instrumentation, such as the double quartet (one quartet on each side of the stereo channel), on albums like Free Jazz. The 2006 live album Sound Grammar is among the 83-year-old saxophonist's better recent efforts."

"I think America concedes that (true American music) has sprung from the negro. When we take these things that come from the art of the Negro and from the heart of the man farthest down."

"Life is like a trumpet. If you don't put anything into it, you don't get anything out."

"If my serenade of song and story should serve as a pillow for some composer's head, as yet perhaps unborn, to dream and build on our fond melodies in his tomorrow, I have not labored in vain."

"It's a street in Memphis that W.C. Handy wrote about in his "Beale Street Blues." You know, If Beale Street could talk,/If Beale Street could talk,/Married men would have to take their beds and walk."

"The blues is a method. It represents a treatment of songs, first by W. C. Handy, and then by a great line of singers and musicians."

"I believe that any "awareness" of life is "spiritual" since awareness can only be a quality of the spirit not of the material world or of matter and machines. Only a spiritual being has awareness. But if you mean "spiritual" in the sense of a kind of "celebration of Life", then yes, I write music to celebrate life. I think most artists do, no matter how they themselves describe it. It's the joy of creating. It's a way of life."

"The values that Scientology states are universal values. Values that any good mother or father or friend couldn't possibly disagree with. They're the values of health and improvement. It's not a belief system where you have to sign up and believe something particularly. People of all religions study Hubbard, and Hubbard himself encouraged religions to flourish because in our day and age, in our mechanized society, what is lacking is the humanities and people with faith and beliefs. So that's one of our operations. We encourage that. I require a certain amount of ethics from anybody I work with."

"It's a way of life for me. To me, Scientology is the very thing that artists need, in the sense that it's not a religion that you have to change the way that you pray or think about the Creator. What's incredible about Scientology is that this is the first time there's been a real technology on human relationships. To me, that's what's missing in the world. Like most of us, I grew up in a mechanical world. And when I got into music, it was mechanical in the sense of choosing notes and chords. Missing were the humanities. What ever happened to how you really live? How you feel? How you relate to people? How you reach out and help someone? I think that's one of the most basic, natural tendencies all people have—to help. Scientology gives you the necessary tools to be successful at helping someone."

"The most prolific and versatile of any modern jazz musician"

"You a motherfucker!"

"Jazz's most protean and unpredictable character."

"Acoustic, electric, latin, free – Chick Corea’s career seems to have touched all the bases in today’s jazz scene. Yet that variety is firmly centred in some abiding principles: a passion for music, the piano, and performance. They were a kind of birthright. [...] Working with all kinds of bands, and absorbing all kinds of styles – with a special fondness for fiery Latin rhythms – Corea built a reputation as composer and player."

"I don't know where it's going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens."

": You liked the arrangement? Monk: Did you make the arrangement? It was crazy. Feather: No. Monk: It was a bunch of musicians who were together, playing an arrangement. It sounded so good, it made me like the song better! Solos ... the trombone sounded good ... that was a good lead trumpet player too ... I don't know how to rate it, but I'd say it was top-notch."

"Which is the way to the toilet?"

"It reminded me of , and that's got to be good. Rhythm section has the right groove, too. Drummer made me think of . Hey, play that again. (Later.) Yeah! He sounds like a piano player! (Hums theme.) You can keep changing keys all the time doing that. Sounds like something that was studied and figured out. And he can play it; you know what's happening with this one. Yeah, he was on a Bobby Timmons kick. He knows what's happening."

"Interviewer: What other interests do you have? Monk: Life in general. Interviewer: What do you do about it? Monk: Keep breathing. Interviewer: What do you think the purpose of life is? Monk: To die."

"All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians."

"Monk enters the studio and starts playing, the rest of the musicians join him. After few minutes of play the technician from his room shouts and stops the band.] Monk: Why did we stop? Technician: I thought you were rehearsing. Monk: Aren't we always?"

"The piano ain't got no wrong notes."

"I know this from somewhere—it seems as though every time I turn on the radio this seems to slip in; and I've always liked it. It's cute, real cute; and although it's sort of not in my department and I don't know too much about that type of music, I like it an awful lot. Wonderful piano ..."

"Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order. I felt I learned from him in every way — through the senses, theoretically, technically. I would talk to Monk about musical problems, and he would sit at the piano and show me the answers just by playing them. I could watch him play and find out the things I wanted to know. Also, I could see a lot of things that I didn't know about at all."

"Working with Monk is like falling down a dark elevator shaft."

"I don't see how a record company can record something like that. You know the way Monk plays—he never gives any support to a rhythm section. When I had him on my date, I had him lay out until the ensemble. I like to hear him play, but I can't stand him in a rhythm section unless it's one of his own songs ... I can't understand a record like this."

"Pianistically, I don't think has anything to worry about, but if he (Monk) gets that stride thing going a little faster, I don't know... Maybe will have to come back. Pianistically, he's beautiful. (A promoter I know uses that phrase; I guess he likes the way it rolls off his tongue.) But Thelonious is pianistically beautiful. He approaches the piano somehow from an angle, and it is the right angle. He does the thing completely and thoroughly... He hasn't been influenced through the traditional techniques because he hasn't worked through the keyboard composers and, therefore, has his own complete approach of musical thinking. He is such a thinking musician, and I think this is something a lot of people forget about Monk. They somehow feel he's eccentric, but Monk knows exactly what he's doing. Structurally, and musically, he's very aware of every note he plays."

"Count Basie at Town Hall ... No, I'm only kidding; of course it was Thelonious Monk. There's been a lot of pro and con talk about Thelonious through the years, but from the beginning I was pro. I was fascinated, and I wondered how he arrived at these things. Eventually I found out, by studying and analyzing them. Now, he is not a virtuoso pianist, but there is real thought behind what he is composing. It's all very well laid out."

"All I can say is, Monk writes some beautiful tunes. When it comes to being a piano player, I'll see you later."

"That piano player sounded as honest as a little child. I think the left hand during the first part was a little hard. It could be Monk. Also it could be Mingus playing piano—sometimes he plays piano like that. I liked the record, the honesty of it and the good feeling it had. However, I think it could have been a little better; so I'll give it a three. I'd rather hear wrong notes being played by a person with good feeling than another person playing perfect, like a typewriter, and sound cold."

"[Reported exchange on telephone in 1980] "Thelonious, are you touching the piano at all these days?" "No, I'm not." "Do you want to get back to playing?" "No, I don't." "I'm only in town for a few days; would you like me to come and visit, to talk about the old days?" "No, I wouldn't." When I repeated this to Barry Harris, the pianist who was much closer to him than almost anyone else in the last years, he said, "You're lucky. You got complete sentences. With most people he just says, 'No.'""

"His is the sort of music that spans time ... it's something that's happening, and it always feels good to me. I can always readily identify with it, and it always has a freshness about it because of the way he constructs his phrases and the kinds of twists it has. I sometimes would like to hear him in a context with some more adventuresome musicians."

"A few weeks ago I made a call at his 63rd St apartment and found him practising very thoughtfully on his Klein piano. I felt pretty good when I realised how satisfied he was with his instrument. He invited me to try it out. First I played one of his compositions which I learned a few weeks ago at the Spotlite which he had played with "Hawk". Later I played some of my own tunes which he seemed to like. We promptly agreed to swap three piano arrangements of our tunes. I would arrange "Stratosphere," "Striving," and "Sailing" for him and he agreed to arrange "Ruby, My Dear," "Round Midnight" and another very expressive tune which he hadn't named or whose name he had forgotten. On the day of the proposed swap my tunes were the only ones completed. However, I haven't given up all hope of eventually learning his tunes which I will play morning, noon, and night."

"That I like. That's Monk ... I think Monk has developed a certain thing. It's not the ordinary left hand like and a lot of piano players used to use; he's done something different"

"Unlike many piano players, I love Monk's playing very much. He was brought to my attention by Richard Abrams, a pianist in Chicago, and we used to analyse Monk's playing. We found that Monk's penchant for playing the piano is not in velocity, and not in dynamics, but in sound and s. He has a lot of other devices for producing the "sound"—I've noticed a lot of times, playing in clubs, where the audience is inattentive, you play something of a Monk nature and use that sonority, automatically their ears respond to it. No other piano player has done more to find out the notes that really produce sound than Monk. To completely toss him aside as a pianistic influence is an asinine view."

"Even people who don’t know much about jazz are aware that jazz musicians are meant to be 'characters' – free-spirited types whose absorption in music generates bizarre behaviour. Though this hipster mythology is exaggerated, it seemed made for Thelonious Monk. His mystique was compounded by his unforgettable name (albeit the same as his father's), his taste for exotic headgear, a penchant for breaking into impromptu dances on the bandstand and a jabbing, idiosyncratic piano style punctuated by the silences which also marked his everyday demeanour. But Monk's media status as the 'high priest of bebop' obscured the real nature of his achievement. At a time when modern jazz was dominated by harmonic legerdemain and omnivorous technique, he showed that a deep-rooted personal vision was still possible. Monk's compositions were unlike anyone else's, full of curiously stretched and sharply angled chords, wrong-footing rhythms, melodies that could be gnomic, rich or grainily lyrical. He defied facility. When you played Monk, you played him on his terms, and his best interpreter was probably himself. His approach to the piano could seem splayed and halting – one fleet-fingered rival dismissed him as 'hamstrung' – but he could produce marvellous, probing colours, somehow getting in between the keys to make the piano seem the ultimate blues instrument. And he swung enormously, with spikey accents and clangorous, tumbling runs. As a soloist or accompanist, his timing was perfect, and he could galvanise a rhythm section by knowing exactly when and when not to play. Listening to Monk can easily become a lifelong habit, since what he has to offer is unavailable anywhere else."

"I'm a songwriter first, have always been, and probably always will be. Making the demo is a natural product of writing a song; after that, I'm happy to hear other people do it in other ways."

"The song is the center; the song is the key. If you don't have a good song you don't have anything by my value."

"Tonight you're mine completely, You give your love so sweetly Tonight the light of love is in your eyes, But will you love me tomorrow?"

"I'd like to know that your love Is love I can be sure of, So tell me now and I won't ask again, Will you still love me tomorrow?"

"All you have to do is touch my hand To show me you understand And something happens to me. That's some kind of wonderful."

"I want to be your lover But your friend is all I've stayed. I'm only halfway to paradise, So near, yet so far away."

"My tears are fallin' 'Cause you've taken her away. And though it really hurts me so, There's something that I've gotta say.Take good care of my baby. Please don't ever make her blue. Just tell her that you love her. Make sure you're thinking of her In everything you say and do."

"Everybody's doin' a brand new dance now. Come on baby, do the locomotion. I know you'll get to like it if you give it a chance now. Come on baby, do the locomotion.My little baby sister can do it with ease; It's easier than learning your ABC's. So come on, come on do the locomotion with me."

"Chains, my baby's got me locked up in chains And they ain't the kind that you can see Woh these chains of love got a hold on me yeah."

"I'll never let you see The way my broken heart is hurting me. I've got my pride and I know how to hide All my sorrow and pain. I'll do my crying in the rain."

"What should I write? What can I say? How can I tell you how much I miss you? The weather here has been as nice as it can be, Although it doesn't really matter much to me. For all the fun I'll have while you're so far away, It might as well rain until September."

"When this old world starts getting me down And people are just too much for me to face, I climb way up to the top of the stairs And all my cares just drift right into space. On the roof, it's peaceful as can be And there the world below can't bother me. Let me tell you now."

"One fine day, you'll look at me And you will know our love was, meant to be. One fine day, you're gonna want me for your girl."

"Hey girl I want you to know I'm gonna miss you so much if you go. And hey girl I tell you no lie, Something deep inside of me's going to die If you say so long, if this is goodbye."

"He gets up each morning and he goes downtown Where everyone's his boss, And he's lost in an angry land. He's a little man. But then he comes uptown Each evening to my tenement. Uptown where folks don't have to pay much rent. And when he's there with me. He can see that he's everything. The man is tall, he don't crawl. He's a king."

"When my friends told me you had someone new I didn't believe a single word was true. I showed them all I had a faith in you I just kept on sayingOh, no, not my baby Oh, no, not my sweet baby You're not like those other guys Who lead you on and tell you lies."

"There's alot of things I want, a lot of things that I'd like to be. But girl, I don't foresee a rags-to-riches story for me. There's just one little dream I've got to come true; There's just one round I've gotta win, I can't be a loser with you. Baby, baby, once in my life, let me get what I want, Girl, don't let me down! Just once in my life, let me hold on to one good thing I found!"

"I think I'm going back To the things I learned so well In my youth. I think I'm returning to The days when I was young enough To know the truth."

"In the midst of all my darkness, baby You came along to guide me. You took pity on a lonely man When you said you'd stand beside me. I'll never forget you Or what you've done. I'll never turn my back on you for anyone.I've got so much love to give you. Baby, I've got so much love to give you. Girl, there's more than enough to last a whole life through, And it's all for you."

"Looking out on the morning rain, I used to feel so uninspired. And when I knew I had to face another day, Lord, it made me feel so tired. Before the day I met you, life was so unkind. Your love was the key to my peace of mind.'Cause you make me feel. You make me feel, You make me feel like A natural woman (woman)."

"When my soul was in the lost and found, You came along to claim it. I didn't know just what was wrong with me Till your kiss helped me name it. Now I'm no longer doubtful of what I'm living for, Cause if I make you happy I don't need to do more."

"The local rock group down the street Is trying hard to learn their song. They serenade the weekend squire Who just came out to mow his lawn. Another pleasant valley Sunday. Charcoal burning everywhere. Rows of houses that are all the same. And no one seems to care."

"Gotta make you love me the way you used to do Gotta get back the feeling and put wind in my sails And chart a course that gets me back to you, back to you. Oh, the lonely days, the lonely nights lookin' back in time. Time, don't run out on me."

"I feel the earth move under my feet I feel the sky tumbling down — tumbling down I feel my heart start to trembling Whenever you're around."

"So far away Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore? It would be so fine to see your face at my door. Doesn't help to know you're so far away."

"You've got to get up every morning with a smile on your face And show the world all the love in your heart The people gonna treat you better, You're gonna find, yes you will, That you're beautiful as you feel."

"If there's any answer, maybe love can end the madness Maybe not, oh, but we can only try."

"Way over yonder is a place I have seen In a garden of wisdom from some long ago dream."

"Way over yonder, that's where I'm bound."

"When you're down and troubled And you need some loving care And nothing, nothing is going right. Close your eyes and think of me And soon I will be there To brighten up even your darkest nights."

"You just call out my name And you know wherever I am I'll come running to see you again. Winter, spring, summer, or fall All you have to do is call And I'll be there, yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got a friend."

"Now ain't it good to know That you've got a friend When People can be so cold. They'll hurt you, kiss and desert you. And take your soul if you let them. Oh, but don't you let them."

"If you're out on the road, Feeling lonely, and so cold, All you have to do is call my name And I'll be there on the next train.Where you lead, I will follow Anywhere that you tell me to. If you need, you need me to be with you, I will follow where you lead."

"You can't talk to a man, with a shotgun in his hand."

"My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue An everlasting vision of the everchanging view A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold."

"He moved with some uncertainty, as if he didn't know Just what he was there for, or where he ought to go Once he reached for something golden hanging from a tree And his hand come down empty..."

"It seemed that he had fallen into someone's wicked spell And I wept to see him suffer, though I didn't know him well."

"It's going to take some time this time To get myself in shape. I really fell out of line this time, I really missed the gate. The birds on the telephone line, (next time) Are cryin' out to me, (next time) And I won't be so blind next time And I'll find some harmony."

"Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, And sometimes the blues just get a hold of you. Just when you thought you had made it, All around the block people will talk. But I want to give it all that I've got. I just don't want, I don't want to waste it."

"Green fields and rolling hills, Room enough to do what we will. Sweet dreams of yestertime Are running though my mind Of a place I left behind. Been so long, I can't remember when, I've been to Canaan and I wanna go back again."

"Only love is real. Everything else illusion Adding to the confusion of the way we connive At being alive. Tracing a line till we can define The thing that allows us to feel. Only love is real."

"Now and forever, you are a part of me And the memory cuts like a knife. Didn't we find the ecstasy, didn't we share the daylight When you walked into my life?Now and forever, I'll remember All the promises still unbroken. And think about all the words between us That never needed to be spoken."

"And it's too late, baby, now it's too late Though we really did try to make it Somethin' inside has died and I can't hide And I just can't fake it."

"Inka dinka doo, a dinka dee, A dinka doo. Oh, what a tune for crooning. Inka dinka doo, a dinka dee A dinka doo. It's got the whole world spooning."

"Don't put no constrictions on da people. Leave 'em ta hell alone."

"That's the conditions that prevail!"

"I'm mortified!"

"Surrounded by assassins!"

"Everybody wants ta get inta da act!"

"I don't know where it's going, but I'm sticking with it!"

"I was hurt so deep that I made up my mind never to hurt anybody else, no matter what. I never made jokes about anybody's big ears, their stut- terin', or about them bein' off their nut."

"Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are."

"Politics is developing more comedians than radio ever did."

"Be awful nice to 'em goin' up, because you're gonna meet 'em all comin' down."

"I really enjoy forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is."

"I have something to say about the difference between American and European cities, but I forgot what it was. I have it written down at home somewhere."

"The better the singer's voice is, the harder it is to believe what they're saying. So I turn my weaknesses into an advantage."

"I try to write about small things. Paper, animals, a house…love is kind of big. I have written a love song, though. In this film, I sing it to a lamp."

"Interviewer: If I gave you fifty dollars, right now, what would you do with it? David Byrne: I would get something to eat."

"It's like 60 Minutes on acid."

"It's not music you would use to get a girl into bed. If anything, you're going to frighten her off."

"If I exorcise my devils, well, my angels may leave too."

"Well, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."

"And sometime around 2 AM you end up taking advantage of yourself. Ain't no way around that. Making a scene with a magazine."

"Don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk."

"I know a place where a royal flush can never beat a pair, and even Thomas Jefferson is On The Nickel over there."

"How do the angels get to sleep / When the Devil leaves his porch light on?"

"I'm so goddamn horny, the crack of dawn better be careful around me!"

"Your veal cutlet gets up off the plate, It walks down to end of the counter and beat the shit out of my cup of coffee. I guess the coffee just wasn't strong enough to defend itself."

"I don't have a drinking problem ‘cept when I can't get a drink."

"And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can forget, that history puts a saint in every dream."

"The piano has been drinking, not me."

"If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man."

"What's he building in there? We have a right to know."

"Come down off the cross, we can use the wood."

"And someone will head south 'til this whole thing cools off."

"And their mouths are cut like razor blades, and their eyes are like stilettos, and her radiator's steaming and her teeth are in a wreck, she won't let you kiss her, but what in the hell do you expect?"

"If you get far enough away you'll be on your way back home."

"The large print giveth and the small print taketh away."

"The face forgives the mirror, the worm forgives the plough, the question begs the answer, can you forgive me somehow?"

"Some men are searching for the Holy Grail, but there ain't nothing sweeter than riding the rail."

"Pregnant women and Vietnam vets, beggin on the freeway, bout as hard as it gets."

"Well, you know when you're the opening act for large groups? Sometimes you feel like a rectal thermometer, you're going out there taking the temperature of the audience."

"Our Father, who art in Cribari, hallowed be thy glass. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in the lounges. Give us this day our daily splash, and forgive us our hangovers as we forgive those who continue to hangover against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil...and somebody give us all a ride home."

"Disneyland is Vegas for children. When I went with the kids, I just about had a stroke. It's the opposite of what they say it is. It's not a place to nurture the imagination. It's just a big clearance sale for useless items. I'm not going back, and the kids won't be allowed to return until they're eighteen, out of the house. And even then, I would block their decision."

"(When asked for advice for younger musicians) "Break windows, smoke cigars, and stay up late. Tell 'em to do that, they'll find a little pot of gold.""

"The dog won't bite if you beat Him with a bone"

"She's been married so many times she's got rice marks all over her face"

"I collaborate with my wife on the songs, and every aspect of it, really— composing, and arranging, and recording, all that business. We have a rhythm and a way of working it. It's kind of like borrowing the same ten bucks from somebody over and over again. But when you live together, it makes it a lot easier, the pay back."

"Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing with the air."

"They say that I have no hits, and I'm difficult to work with. And they say that like it's a bad thing."

"The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. It cheapens and degrades the human experience, when it should inspire and elevate."

"We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness....We are monkeys with money and guns."

""I always wondered how Tom Waits would sing 'Greensleeves'...." --Loreena McKennitt, "The Visit"."

"No one can ever heap enough insults upon me to suit my taste. I think we all really thrive on hostility, because it's the most intense kind of massage the ego can undergo. Other people's indifference is the only horror."

"Many days later another caravan was passing and a man saw something on top of the highest dune there. And when they went up to see, they found Outka, Mimouna and Aicha; they were still there, lying the same way as when they had gone to sleep. And all three of the glasses... were full of sand. That was how they had their tea in the Sahara."

"Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

"For in order to avoid having to deal with relative values, he had long since come to deny all purpose to the phenomenon of existence — it was more expedient and comforting."

"So she said banteringly: "What's the unit of exchange in this different world of yours?" He did not hesitate. "The tear." "It isn't fair," she objected. "Some people have to work very hard for a tear. Others can have them just for thinking." "What system of exchange is fair?" he cried, and his voice sounded as if he were really drunk. "And whoever invented the concept of fairness, anyway? Isn't everything easier if you simply get rid of the idea of justice altogether? You think the quantity of pleasure, the degree of suffering is constant among all men? It somehow comes out in the end? You think that? If it comes out even it's only because the final sum is zero.""

"A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky's clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose."

"Africa was a big place and would offer its own suggestions"

"For God's sake, sit down. You look like a Calvinist rector telling his flock about Hell."

"We're all monsters," said Daisy with enthusiasm. "It's the Age of Monsters."

"Dr Slade went in to lunch in a state of desperate boredom tempered with resentment; it had shaken him a little to see how bad luck could be prolonged to such unlikely lengths."

"Every second, ten stars set behind the black water in the west."

"It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)."

"I think of music sometimes in terms of color [...] and [in a furnace] I like to see the flames licking yellow in the dark and then pulsing down to a kind of red glow."

"[Sights enabling musical inspiration] The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician [...] Things like the old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night, or something someone said long ago. I remember I once wrote a sixty-four-bar piece about a memory of when I was a little boy in bed and heard a man whistling on the street outside, his footsteps echoing away. Things like these may be more important to a musician than technique."

"As Bach says [...] if you ain't got a left hand, you ain't worth a hoot in hell."

"[Expressing a liking for trains] Folks can't rush you until you get off."

"You can't write music right [...] until you know how the man that'll play it plays poker."

"[Y]ou've got to write with certain men in mind. You write just for their abilities and natural tendencies and give them places where they do their best—certain entrances and background stuff. You got to know each man to know what he'll react well to. One guy likes very simple ornamentation; another guy likes ornamentation better than the theme because it gives him a feeling of being a second mind. Every musician has his favorite licks and you gotta write to them."

"I know what sounds well on a trombone and I know what sounds well on a trumpet and they are not the same. [...] I know what Tricky Sam can play on a trombone and I know what Lawrence Brown can play on a trombone and they are not the same either."

"My band is my instrument more than the piano."

"Playing "Bop" is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing."

"[Asked about the vogue for Rock 'n' Roll and calypso] [N]o matter what you call it, music is as good as it sounds. Music is an oral art. Until you hear it, it is not music and if it sounds good it is good."

"The piano players were very important in the early days, and the great piano players were always on the East Coast; there never was anybody in the West who could play two notes. (By West I mean ; in those days there was no other West to speak of, west of that.) , who was mainly a writer and had more music published than anyone else, played piano like one of those high school teachers in Washington; as a matter of fact, high school teachers played better jazz. Among other things, his rhythm was unsteady; but that's the kind of piano the West was geared up to. On the other hand, the piano players on the East Coast did the most impossible things. If you dig up the early piano rolls or records by , you will hear the most beautiful and perfect performances. was a giant of those days, too. It is one of my great regrets that when the Lion used to come up to my house I didn't have a recording machine so that I could preserve some of those early performances of his."

"It's like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something."

"There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind ... the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it's successful; if it doesn't it has failed."

"Every man prays in his own language."

"How can anyone expect to be understood unless he presents his thoughts with complete honesty? This situation is unfair because it asks too much of the world. In effect, we say, "I don't dare show you what I am because I don't trust you for a minute but please love me anyway because I so need you to. And, of course, if you don't love me anyway, you're a dirty dog, just as I suspected, so I was right in the first place." Yet, every time God's children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened."

"Fate is being kind to me. [...] Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young."

"[Asked about his "fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young" comment] What else could I have said? [...] In the first place, I never do give any thought to prizes. I work and I write, and that's it. My reward is hearing what I have done, and unlike most composers, I can hear it immediately. That's why I keep these expensive gentlemen with me. And secondly, I'm hardly surprised that my kind of music is still without, let us say, official honor at home. Most Americans still take it for granted that European music–classical music, if you will–is the only really respectable kind. I remember, for example when Franklin Roosevelt died, practically no American music was played on the air in tribute to him. We were given a dispensation, I must admit. We did one radio program dedicated to him. But by and large, then as now, jazz was the kind of man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with. The word 'jazz' has been part of the problem [...] It never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the nineteen-twenties, I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing "negro music". But it's too late for that now. The music has become so integrated you can't tell one part from the other as far as color is concerned. Well, I don't have time time to worry about it. I've got too much music on my mind."

"Roaming through the jungle of "oohs" and "ahs," searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats."

"Louis Armstrong was on J-and never got off his J-never, never stopped. I mean for all intents and purposes, died with his trumpet in his hand. So did Duke Ellington, all those people who inspire one, who inspire me. Duke was still going on the road right up till the last. Louis Armstrong still on the road till the very last. I appreciate that, I respect it and I am grateful for it. I am grateful, in the name of my grandson I am grateful."

"Of course anything that Duke does I like. He just seems to have a sixth sense about things turning out so good ... But I especially like the marriage between strings and what he did with the band. He didn't confine the strings to just whole notes and half notes, which most guys do, but he gave them little pizzicato things and little staccato things in there, which works out beautifully ...."

"Well, that's about the quintessence of slick, professional, expert, boring arrangement. I couldn't say offhand who it was. As I say, I haven't heard jazz for a year. I found it dull—the last word in polish and professionality [sic]—but dull."

"That's wild! I'll start off with five stars and work backwards from there. Now there, to me, is the most perfect band in existence, whether you're thinking of it orchestrationally or in terms of Duke's immensely creative writing. I can't think of anybody I admire more than this man; nobody could even be compared with him, except Billy Strayhorn. Duke does something with this old, tired instrumentation of trumpets, trombones and saxophones, and he has a perfect way of utilizing the men's specific sounds. Anything he plays is a work of art. The band is out of tune, for instance, and it doesn't even matter. They almost have their own brand of intonation. Duke can take an exotic-sounding idea and create something – you might call it sophisticated crudity. It gives both the qualities that I look for – an earthy quality and the sophisticated quality."

"Since jazz is usually celebrated as an improvisor’s art, it may seem paradoxical that one of its major figures was a composer. Though Duke Ellington was a notable pianist, he declared, ‘My band is my instrument,’ and for over half a century he made it the medium of a peerless body of work. For Ellington, composition was never an abstract process, but a direct response to people and situations. He once said, ‘I see something and want to make a tone parallel,’ and the titles of his works are a catalogue of incidents, encounters and atmospheres. ‘Haunted Nights’, ‘The Mooche’, ‘Daybreak Express’, ‘Black, Brown and Beige’ – every Ellington piece enshrines a life in motion, pursued with spontaneity. And Ellington’s lifelong companions were the members of his band – among them the gutbucket growls of trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams, the arching sensuousness of altoist Johnny Hodges and the rumbling majesty of Harry Carney’s baritone. As individual and sometimes contrary a set of virtuosos as ever shared a bandstand, he composed with these sounds and personalities in his head, writing specifically for them. And they provided the raw material for his astonishing originality in harmony and orchestration. To many, Ellington may have been known for such lush popular hits as ‘Sophisticated Lady’, but his colleagues recognised an attainment of another order. As Miles Davis put it, ‘Some day all the jazz musicians should get together in one place and go down on their knees and thank Duke.’"

"For a while it looked like I was going to be stuck in westerns. I figured out I could make 6 a year for 60 years and then retire. I decided I didn't want it. So I started blinking my eyes every time a gun went off in the scenes. That got me out of westerns."

"She may have been right. Looking back, I suppose I was expecting, as a young actor, to discuss Stanislavski or 'Acting as an art.' Instead, I palled around with the crew—the grips, the stagehands—and the conversation centered around the two B's—broads and booze."

"I usually take no notice of reviews unless a critic has thought up some new way of describing me. That old one about the way I sleep my way through pictures is so hackneyed now."

"No. But it was indicated by other people that I should go there—like my wife, my friends, the woman from Alcoholics Anonymous who came around. My wife, Dottie, was the prime mover. It would have been a disappointment to her if I'd rejected her suggestion. I stayed until they were done with me. I don't know if it 'worked.' I don't understand that."

"Listen, when I arrived in Los Angeles in the early '40s, there were just 640,000 people. Every loser in the world headed there because there was no competition. The keynote was mediocrity because the film, radio and music businesses had defined that the average mental age of the audience was 12. They handed me the bloodstained hat of a guy who'd fallen off his horse and suddenly I was in the movies—in a Hopalong Cassidy picture. I give hope to the hopeless. People say, "If he can make it, I can be Queen of England."

"Yeah, I'm unique—like an actor who has only one eye in the middle of his forehead. Or the Elephant Man. I've got a patent on the type. To be an actor is to be a moveable freak. Once you have been up there on that giant screen, everybody knows you—and you know no one. It counts as a source of embarrassment."

"Got the same attitude I had when I started. Haven't changed anything but my underwear. I've played everything except midgets and women. People can't make up their minds whether I'm the greatest actor in the world - or the worst. Matter of fact, neither can I. It's been said I underplay so much, I could have stayed home. But I must be good at my job. Or they wouldn't haul me around the world at these prices."

"Hey, I get enough exercise; I breathe in and I breathe out."

"You know you can't act, and if you hadn't been good-looking you never would've gotten a picture."

"As an actor he is superb. However you read a line, he has anticipated it. He is a fantastically sensitive, decent human being."

"Deep down he is a gentle, obliquely witty man, possessed of many, many more talents than the acting by which he is known."

"The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel."

"Some stances are just conducive to swinging. If I stand up straight for too long it's harder to swing. Plus my feet hurt."

"They take your drawers off for you, they show your ass, they sell bullshit, they call themselves 'niggaz' and the women 'bitches' and 'hos' and it's fine with everybody. ...That's what the essence of decadence is. Civilisation is an effort."

"I had a trumpet, but I didn't want to be a trumpet player. I wanted to be some type of athlete or in some type of scholarly activity, be a chemist or something―I had my little chemistry set, and I liked playing with it."

"I always believed in working hard. ...That’s something that my father and my great-uncle would always tell me. My great-uncle was a stone-cutter for the cemetery, and he was in his nineties. He would always say, "Learn how to work a job. Your job is your identity. You don’t work a job for somebody else. You work your job for yourself." So when I got to be serious about music, I started practicing, and trying to look for teachers."

"I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice."

"That's democratic leadership. It's like a flock of geese. They make the calls from the back. ...If you really are leading, everybody is leading. ...Chris Crenshaw ...started to tell me, from the last two songs, who hadn't played. ...So then we all started to look out for each other. ...Then we start to negotiate the song so that we make sure everyone plays."

"The level of corruption we're seeing now... I'm a nonpartisan attacker of the corruption I see. I've been doing it for 40 years, and what you're seeing in the public space now is the type of arrogance and criminal activity that we were always working our way towards. Now you see it. ...[H]ow do the people at large respond to this? ...The judicial system is not saving us the way it should. ...[W]e have to wake up and say "we're tired of this..." And... if we don't, we're going to be just like all the other things that could've been something."

"[I]n jazz you can plug the base amp in, the drummer can play loud, one soloist can play 400 choruses, and the next one can fight by playing 430. The music breaks down. You have to balance your freedom to improvise with restraint that comes with swinging and recognizing other people. Democracy dies when you do not understand the need for leveling, and to create wealth for everybody, and to see in your neighbor not an enemy, but a friend, and for elites to manage themselves."

"That's what I have to say as a band leader. I can't say, "Well, I'm going to solo on every tune. Every time somebody plays it's me." That's not the solution."

"[W]e're in trouble right now, but... a doctor doesn't go into a place where a lot of people are sick and say, "Man, a lot of people are sick here." You're the doctor, man! Come in and help people. So let's roll up our sleeves. A lot of talking always goes on about democracy. Let's see! ...I'm the doctor of democracy. Let's go!"

"I'm writing my 5th . It's called the Liberty Symphony. ...It will be rah, rah optimism, but it will also be movements like, "This you did, despite the word of the Lord." ...I take all this very seriously."

"The reason why the music is important is that it's an art form—an ancient art form—that takes in the mythology of our people."

"Flexibility is an essential part of Jazz. It's what gives Jazz music the ability to combine with all other types of music and not lose its identity."

"Wynton Marsalis' skills have grown as fast as his ambition, and he is the most ambitious younger composer in Jazz."

"How you feel about Wynton Marsalis may indicate how you feel about jazz. To some fans he’s been a kind of saviour, restoring the music’s essence by reconnecting it to its roots in blues and swing, after its post-1960s fragmentation into fusion, free, world, acid, smooth, etc. But to others, his neo-conservatism is actually anti-jazz, restricting its evolutionary energy and creating ‘mausoleum music’. But no one doubts Marsalis’s authority, sincerity and talent. His virtuosity made him famous when he was barely out of his teens, achieving the unprecedented feat of winning Grammy awards in both classical and jazz categories in the same year. In fact, his passion for the trumpet first led him to jazz. Growing up in New Orleans in the 1970s, Marsalis was a mere dabbler in funk until his classical trumpet teacher introduced him to such jazz masters as Clifford Brown. His imagination was fired by a music that combined individuality and virtuosity, forged in African-American experience. That devotion to the heritage and expressive power of jazz still informs everything Marsalis does. It’s why he has fiercely decried the sort of all-purpose dumbing down which, to him, misrepresents the legacy of such African-American heroes as Armstrong, Ellington and Monk. As the trumpeter berated a critic: ‘We are not some hip sub-culture for your entertainment. Jazz is the most intelligent music of all time.’"

"Interesting pianist, but I think he is just a little bit meshuga."

"Perfection itself is imperfection."

"Of the Russian pianists I like only one, Richter. Gilels did some things well, but I did not like his mannerisms, the way he moved around while he was playing."

"I was impressed mostly by Gieseking [Horowitz said in 1987]. He had a finished style, played with elegance, and had a fine musical mind."

"I heard Edwin Fischer, who did not mean much to me. I heard another pianist in Berlin who had a big success and I thought he was awful — Mischa Levitzki. Just fingers, and you cannot listen only to fingers. There is a difference between artist and artisan. Levitzki was an artisan. But Ignaz Friedman, who I admired, was a great artist. He had wonderful fingers and a very personal, individual way of playing, even if some of his ideas were very strange to me. He had no hesitation touching up the music. I got annoyed with him at one concert when he changed the basses in Chopin's F minor Ballade. I didn't like that. For some reason he was happier making records than he was on the stage."

"I liked him [Arthur Rubinstein] as a pianist. He was a good musician and had a fantastic repertoire. He never had a great technique, but certain things he played well. I heard him play some of the Chopin etudes, the easier ones with great panache and I told him I had never heard them played better. He said, "Do you mean it?" and I said, "Yes, I do mean it.""

"there are three kinds of pianists: Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists, and bad pianists."

"I don’t believe that about his Chopin, actually. I think his Chopin was extraordinarily perceptive and terribly personal. ... On the criticism of Horowitz’ Chopin, I haven’t heard that myself, but I think that comes down to taste."

"Nearly five years have passed since I had the opportunity to admire this magician of the keyboard. My impatience to hear him again was shared by the public, who actually assaulted the doors of the great Salle Pleyel in order to attend the Horowitz recital. I expected to hear the 'demonic' virtuoso who amazed the world at his debut. Instead I found him transformed-but not for the better. He still remains the same extraordinary pianist, but I had the impression-and I hope I am not the only one-that Horowitz is trying a tout prix to 'purify' his interpretations, to strip them of anything approaching artificiality. Yet, he accomplished this in such a way as to produce the contrary effect: his playing becomes mechanical and deadly artificial!"

"No pianist, it is unnecessary to say, has an all-embracing culture. Like any other, Horowitz has had his specialties. Most professionals would agree that Horowitz played Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Scriabin and Prokofieff with more flair than any pianist of his time. And one of the curious things about this extraordinary technician was that he had a surprising affinity for the miniatures of the repertoire. Scarlatti; Chopin mazurkas and waltzes; isolated pieces by Schumann; salon music by Moszkowski — these he played with grace, charm and unaffected simplicity. In the larger Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin works, he sometimes would become too engrossed in detail, and at those moments his playing could sound disconnected. At times, too, the nervous intensity with which he approached music could be unsettling. Inner repose was lacking. Yet he could turn around and play Schumann's Arabesque in a calm, rippling, spacious manner, or sing out the last movement of the C major Fantasy with with wide-arched lines and a luminous quality of tone. A paradoxical and fearsome pianist."

"I don't expect people who listen to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer to come hear me. I accept that reality."

"Sometimes when it goes really well, you wonder, "who's that at the piano?""

"You practice so you can invent. Discipline? No. The joy of practicing leads you to the celebration of the creation."

"To feel is the most terrifying thing in this society."

"Even listeners who dispute Cecil Taylor’s jazz credentials wouldn’t deny his creative intensity. They’d just protest that his furious, free-form piano improvisations, pummelling the keyboard with fingers, fists and forearms, bearing no relation to metre or melody and often lasting well over an hour, belong to the European avant-garde, not African-American tradition. But Taylor himself has always disagreed. Though conservatory-trained and possessing a virtuoso technique, he regards jazz as black music, his way, he once said, ‘of holding on to Negro culture’. His fascination with the rhythmic and harmonic abstractions of Stravinsky and Bartók, Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano gave way to the potency of African-American pianists: Ellington, Monk, Horace Silver. Revelling in what he called ‘the physicality, the filth, the movement in the attack’, the young Taylor made it his own. He viewed the piano as percussive – ‘88 tuned drums’, his style an amalgam he dubbed ‘rhythm-sound-energy’. His ultimate inspiration was the very force of nature: ‘music is as close as I can become to a mountain, tree or river’. Though that kind of mysticism may seem a long way from blues and swing, Taylor’s work has its own intoxication."

"I’ll play it and tell you what it is later."

"I can't tell... All those white tenor players sound alike to me."

"Is that what you wanted, Alfred?"

"The music has gotten thick. Guys give me tunes and they're full of chords. I can't play them...I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them."

""You can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played." and "I love Pops" (Louis' nickname) … Louis has been through all kinds of styles. That's good tuba, by the way. You know you can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played — I mean even modern. I love his approach to the trumpet; he never sounds bad. He plays on the beat — with feeling. That's another phrase for swing. I also love the way he sings."

"When they make records with all the mistakes in, as well as the rest, then they'll really make jazz records. If the mistakes aren't there too, it ain't none of you."

"I love Pops, I love the way he sings, the way he plays - everything he does, except when he says something against modern-jazz music."

"What am I supposed to say to that? That's ridiculous. You see the way they can ____ up music? It's a mismatch. They don't complement each other. Max and Mingus can play together, by themselves. Mingus is a hell of a bass player, and Max is a hell of a drummer. But Duke can't play with them, and they can't play with Duke. Now, how are you going to give a thing like that some stars? Record companies should be kicked in the ___. Somebody should take a picket sign and picket the record company."

"Take it off! That's some sad ____, man. In the first place, I hear some Charlie Parker cliches. . . . They don't even fit. Is that what the critics are digging? Them critics better stop having coffee. If there ain't nothing to listen to, they might as well admit it. Just to take something like that and say it's great, because there ain't nothing to listen to, that's like going out and getting a prostitute. [Leonard Feather: This man said he was influenced by Duke Ellington.] I don't give a ____! It must be . Right? I don't care who he's inspired by. That ____ ain't nothing. In the first place he don't have the - you know, the way you touch a piano. He doesn't have the touch that would make the sound of whatever he thinks of come off. I can tell he's influenced by Duke, but to put the loud pedal on the piano and make a run is very old-fashioned to me. And when the alto player sits up there and plays without no tone . . . That's the reason I don't buy any records."

"My ego only needs a good rhythm section."

"Coleman Hawkins told me never to play with someone older than me, and I never have. With older players, there's no force, no drive. With younger players, it's not that you know it all, or I know it all—it's I'm trying to learn it all."

"I know what the power of silence is. When I used to play in clubs, everybody was loud; there was a lot of noise. So I would take my mute off the microphone, and I would play something so soft that you could hardly hear it... and you talk about listening. Roy Eldridge did that. He's one of my favorites."

"The only thing I'm interested in is the music and the musicians. I don't acknowledge applause 'cause I'm giving them something. They're not giving me anything with their applause. Can I write that down?"

"Billie Holiday—she was the nicest woman in the world, you know. All she wanted to do was sing. They picked on her and picked on her to get money out of her. You do drugs 'cause you like to, not 'cause it's a life-style.... They picked on Billie so much. She said, "Miles, come and see me in Long Island." She was in love with one of my kids and his curly hair—he used to ride my bicycle and watch the horse at Aqueduct. She said, "Miles, if they'd just leave me alone; they could have the house—everything." You know the way singers shake their asses now. Billie didn't have to do that. Her mouth was so sensuous; she was pretty and she would say certain words and her mouth would quiver, and she always had this white gardenia and long gloves."

"If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow."

"He never wasted a melody. He never wasted a phrase. He and Duke Ellington changed the whole sound. There is no way to describe it because there's nobody on this earth that can do that anymore. What he did to the texture of an orchestration, what he did with a pop song is like writing an original piece. Students will discover him. They'll have to take his music apart layer by layer. That's how they'll know what kind of genius he was."

"For me, music and life are all about style."

"I've changed music four or five times. What have you done of any importance other than be white?"

"Why'd you put that white bitch on there?"

"When you are creating your own shit, man, even the sky ain't the limit."

"Don't play what's there, play what's not there."

"A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it."

"Try taking the fucking horn out of your mouth."

"It's that goddamned motherfucking 'Machine Gun.'"

"He could very well be the Duke Ellington of Rock 'n' Roll."

"A lot of Negro style-the style of a man like Miles Davis or Ray Charles or the style of a man like myself is based on a knowledge of what people are really saying and on our refusal to hear it. You pick up on the beat, which is much more truthful than words."

"Another place I worked a lot was the Open Door, where we used to go to hear Miles. I didn't go to hear Miles; I went to see his wardrobe, because he had gorgeous clothes. He always played into the drapes and showed complete contempt for the audience."

"I would like to hear more of the consummate melodic master, but I feel that big business and his record company have had a corrupting influence on his material. The rock and pop thing certainly draws a wider audience. It happens more and more these days, that unqualified people with executive positions try to tell musicians what is good and what is bad music. It’s tempting for the musician to prejudice his own views when recording opportunities are so infrequent but I for one am determined to resist the temptation."

"Miles said he looked on his need for constant change as a curse. However, Miles, along with Duke Ellington, in terms of looking for models of how you strategize with a band, have been there constantly in the background for me. Not the Beatles as a construct for a group, not Led Zeppelin, not the Floyd. My guides have always been Miles and Duke."

"And on one particularly weighty draft he turned in, I told him to go home that night, pour a drink, and listen to some Miles Davis. I told him the thing about Miles Davis is the silences. The notes he doesn’t play. So with that in mind, go take another swing at your draft, find me some silences, and then I’ll get to work."

"When the world speaks of Miles, the legend, they have no idea who the man really was. The Miles I knew was sensitive and ailing, bruised by the hurts this life metes out. With trembling lips, he told me of the years during his childhood in East St. Louis when he'd been called Blackie by his friends and even some of his family, gazed down upon as a nobody, rendered invisible by his dark hue. He told me of the time, at age thirteen, when he'd been seduced by a grown woman, forced into his first sexual encounter with a friend of a relative. He spoke of the time when his father, a well-to-do dentist, had wanted him to follow in his career path, until a teacher who'd recognized Miles' gift intervened. "Forget it. Little Davis is not going to be any dentist," that teacher told Miles' father. "He's going to be a musician." The first time Miles blew that horn, he'd found his consolation. In playing that trumpet, he did the only thing he knew how, the one thing that made him feel worthy. That is the Miles I knew and, in time, grew to cherish."

"I don't excuse Miles' conduct any more than I dismiss my willingness, consciously or unknowingly, to indulge it. We mortals breathe incongruity. That I chose to stay with Miles is still, in many ways, confounding to me. And yet I've come to realize that Miles' behavior felt sorely familiar, a song, blaring and dissonant, that I'd learned in my early years. [...] My father had taught me the music. And my mother, in her own way, had emphasized each measure, hummed along with the clamor even as she railed against it. "Men will be men," she'd sometimes mutter, following a feud with my father, her way of rationalizing his adultery. [...] And in my Upper East Side high-rise, a world away from the slum of my girlhood and yet overlapping with it, Miles would be Miles."

"Most jazz musicians are happy just to achieve some popularity, but Miles Davis was a genuine icon. Famously fashionable even in his early days – a Davis biography was subtitled ‘The Man in the Green Shirt’ after a particularly stylish album cover – his adoption of jazz-rock in the 1970s and ’80s made him a superstar, bewitching audiences with not just his spare, declamatory trumpet-playing, but also his brooding persona. Dubbed the ‘Prince of Darkness’, he prowled about the stage in extravagantly hip garb, mercurially cueing his heavily amplified ensemble, creating a delicious aura of mystery and occasional menace. Musically, Davis’s foray into fusion divided his fans. Older listeners preferred the Davis of the ’50s and ’60s, whose brilliant bands reinvented and extended the bebop tradition as well as launching such seminal talents as John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock. But change seemed the driving principle of Davis’s artistic and personal life, and embracing rock seemed a necessary progression."

"The greatest work of the composer is often sublimation, that is, the deflection of energies, thoughts, occurrences, psychological and physical reactions, into socially constructive or creative channels."

"… I often feel literally nauseated upon hearing works representative of the "new simplicity", or of the "new romantic" genre, works which, by aiming low, targeting only the mock-astral plane of musical yuppiedom, ignore the very dangers which make genuine art both human and transcendent. Fortunately, we are witnessing the growth of a grass-roots movement comprised of composers and performers who, having peeked over the fence surrounding this dungheap, have determined that shovelling shit is not to be their fate, and who are lovingly dedicating their lives to the seemingly endless, often agonizing labor which the production of challenging new works entails."

"It certainly will be if you are still around."

"Tell me, George, if you had it to do all over, would you fall in love with yourself again?"

"It would have been better if you had died and Gershwin had written the elegy."

"A symphonic conductor should reconcile himself to the realization that, regardless of his approach or temperament, the eventual result is the same — the orchestra will hate him."

"I would like to have been present, if I could have my choice of all moments in music history, when Stokowski suddenly became conscious of his beautiful hands. That must have been a moment. Like stout Cortez [sic] on a peak in Darien (I know it was Balboa) he saw before him a limitless expanse, a whole uncharted sea that might be subjected to his influence, free from the encumbrance of a baton."

"He never asks the orchestra to do anything which contradicts the players' feeling of what the music signifies or what the printed notes of the score actually mean in plain musical language. To his credit he does not pretend to omniscience. When a certain progression of programs with the Philharmonic decreed that he conduct the Brahms Fourth Symphony two seasons ago, he disavowed intensive rehearsals with the simple statement to the orchestra: "Gentlemen, you know the work better than I do." Both the compliment and the attitude endeared themselves so much to the orchestra that they literally forgot themselves in a mass effort to justify his statement—and, as one of those who heard the performance, I can testify that they delivered one of the most powerful and integrated interpretations of the score that New York has experienced in years."

"Incompatibility. And besides, I think she hated me."

"This piano plays. Which is more than I can say for her."

"It's not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character."

"The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue."

"I don't drink liquor. I don't like it. It makes me feel good."

"I'm a study of a man in chaos in search of frenzy."

"There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."

"Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you will find the real tinsel underneath."

"My last picture for Warners was Romance on the High Seas. It was Doris Day's first picture; that was before she became a virgin."

"I once said cynically of a politician, "He'll double-cross that bridge when he comes to it.""

"An epigram is only a wisecrack that's played at Carnegie Hall."

"I heartily approve of her campaign to beautify America. It would be greatly improved if the First Family were kept out of sight."

"Zsa Zsa Gabor not only worships at The Golden Calf, she insists on barbecuing it for lunch."

"Ballet is the fairies' baseball."

"The difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is that the Democrats let the poor be corrupt, too."

"John O'Hara was a terrible bore as a young man—always looking for a fight, and making sure he never found one."

"Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember."

"He writes the kind of music you whistle on the way into the theater."

"If George is around, it will."

"It's an advantage having a limited output. When George Gershwin is asked to play his repertoire, he plays all evening. I just play "Lady Play Your Mandolin" and I'm through."

"I envy people who drink — at least they know what to blame everything on."

"What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left."

"I am no more humble than my talents require."

"I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself."

"I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients."

"Once he makes up his mind, he's full of indecision."

"Now that Marilyn Monroe is kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her."

"The other night my daughter Lorna reminisced about the time I regressed to complete infantilism. We were having dinner and tapioca pudding was served. A wild glint came into my eyes and in the presence of my wife and children I shrieked at the top of my voice, “I love this more than anything in the world!” I had to be withdrawn from tapioca pudding slowly. It was one of the few times I wasn’t committed to achieve withdrawal."

"When I used to speak of the lunatic fringe, I didn’t know I was going to be head of it."

"Apropos of nothing, I asked [Truman] Capote, “Are you for integration?” He said, “Yes, are you for integration?” I said, “I’m for disintegration… personal disintegration.”"

"I rated the drug Demerol over sex as the ultimate pleasure at one time. Now I don’t have access to either."

"As a rule I never read bad reviews about myself because my best friends invariably tell me about them."

"A psychiatrist once diagnosed my troubles as “an abdication of will.”"

"Instant unconsciousness had been my greatest passion for ten years."

"I have seizures of momentary sanity."

"In the middle and late 50′s I was in hospitals constantly. I was committed every time I drew a breath or took an extra twelve pills–which never affected me much because I’m not suicidal."

"When I was in my prime, I was an egomaniac and didn’t allow my wife to buy the best sardines–the King Oscars–which bear my name. I felt there should be only one king in my house."

"[Ira Gershwin] said that [P.G.] Wodehouse will address a letter, stamp it and throw it out of his third-story window onto the street trusting in the good nature of passerby to pick it up and mail it."

"The book should be a happy introduction to a character who, if he did not exist, could not be imagined."

"Oscar would have been here at the head table—but he was feeling well."

"I was fond of Oscar, but there was something about our twin natures which made us exchange insults. I told him that I wanted to make a date with him every day so that I would know where he was and could avoid the place."

"I was on Information Please with him and afterward there was a party and idly Oscar sat down at the piano and began to play. I remember how the conversation hushed in the crowded room. The waiters stopped serving and stood, silently listening. Yet, on this TV show, he seems almost a buffoon, as if he is deliberately mocking himself, drawing a caricature of the old Levant."

"I can see him to this day. He was witty and funny, always playing himself in the movies. He smoked so many cigarettes, there was a nicotine streak on his upper lip and on his fingers between the index finger and the second one. He was a wonderful guy—but he played the piano like a sledgehammer."

"It is not always possible to predict the response of a doting Jewish mother. Witness the occasion on which the late piano virtuoso Oscar Levant telephoned his mother with some important news. He had proposed to his beloved and been accepted. Replied Mother Levant: “Good, Oscar, I’m happy to hear it. But did you practice today?”"

"About his neuroses and hypochondria, the 1920s and 1930s wit Alexander Woollcott, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, once said of him: "There isn't anything the matter with Levant that a few miracles wouldn't cure.""

"Don't take any shit from anybody!"

"And in truth, of course, I'm not just 60 - I'm twelve, I'm 23, I'm 37, I'm 42, I'm 18. I'm every age I've ever been. Depending on what day of the week it is and what the situation calls for at the moment."

"She's got a way about her I don't know what it is. But I know that I can't live without her. She's got a way of pleasin' I don't know what it is But there doesn't have to be a reason anyway."

"She comes to me when I'm feelin' down Inspires me without a sound She touches me and I get turned around."

"You can walk away from your mistakes You can turn your back on what you do Just a little smile is all it takes And you can have your cake and eat it too. Loneliness will get to you somehow But ev'rybody loves you now."

"It's nine o' clock on a Saturday Regular crowd shuffles in There's an old man sitting next to me Making love to his tonic and gin."

"Sing us a song you're the piano man Sing us a song tonight. Well we're all in the mood for a melody And you've got us feeling alright."

"And the waitress is practicing politics As the businessmen slowly get stoned Yes they're sharing a drink they call loneliness But it's better than drinking alone."

"If I traveled all my life And I never get to stop and settle down Long as I have you by my side There's a roof above and good walls all around You're my castle, you're my cabin and my instant pleasure dome I need you in my house 'cause you're my home."

"From a town known as Wheeling, West Virginia Rode a boy with a six-gun in his hand And his daring life of crime made him a legend in his time East and west of the Rio Grande. Well, he started with a bank in Colorado In the pocket of his vest a Colt he hid. And his age and his size took the teller by surprise, And the word spread of Billy the Kid."

"So you play your albums and you smoke your pot And you meet your girlfriend in the parking lot Oh, but still you're aching for the things you haven't got, What went wrong? And if you can't understand why your world is so dead And why you've got to keep in style and feed your head Well, you're twenty one and still you mother makes your bed And that's too long."

"Streetlife serenaders Have no obligations Hold no grand illusions Need no stimulation."

"Hiding up in the mountains Laying low in the canyons Goin' nowhere in the streets With the Spanish names Makin' love with the natives In their Hollywood places Making up for all the time gone by Los Angelenos All came from somewhere."

"I am the entertainer and I know just where I stand Another serenader and another long haired band Today I am your champion, I may have won your hearts, But I know the game, you'll forget my name, And I won't be here in another year If I don't stay on the charts."

"I am the entertainer, I've come to do my show You've heard my latest record, it's been on the radio It took me years to write it, they were the best years of my life It was a beautiful song but it ran too long If you're gonna have a hit you gotta make it fit So they cut it down to 3:05."

"I am the entertainer, the idol of my age I make all kinds of money when I go on the stage You see me in the papers, I've been in the magazines But if I go cold, I won't get sold I get put in the back in the discount rack Like another can of beans."

"So many faces in and out of my life Some will last Some will be just now and then. Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes I'm afraid it's time for goodbye again. Say goodbye to Hollywood Say goodbye my baby Say goodbye to Hollywood Say goodbye my baby."

"Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity Our reason coexists with our insanity And though we choose between reality and madness It's either sadness or euphoria."

"Some folks like to get away Take a holiday from the neighborhood. Hop a flight to Miami Beach Or to Hollywood But I'm talking a Greyhound On the Hudson River Line. I'm in a New York state of mind."

"It was so easy living day by day Out of touch with the rhythm and blues But now I need a little give and take The New York Times, The Daily News."

"There's a place in the world for the angry young man With his working class ties and his radical plans He refuses to bend he refuses to crawl And he's always at home with his back to the wall And he's proud of his scars and the battles he's lost And struggles and bleeds as he hangs on his cross And likes to be known as the angry young man."

"I believe I've passed the age of consciousness and righteous rage I found that just surviving was a noble fight I once believed in causes too I had my pointless point of view And life went on no matter who was wrong or right."

"So before we end and then begin We'll drink a toast to how it's been A few more hours to be complete A few more nights on satin sheets A few more times that I can say I've loved these days."

"Seen the lights go out Broadway I saw the Empire State laid low And life went on beyond the Palisades They all bought Cadillacs And left there long ago."

"You know those lights were bright on Broadway That was so many years ago Before we all lived here in Florida Before the Mafia took over Mexico. There are not many who remember They say a handful still survive To tell the world about The way the lights went out And keep the memory alive."

"It seems such a waste of time If that's what it's all about If that's movin' up then I'm movin' out."

"Well, we all fall in love But we disregard the danger Though we share so many secrets There are some we never tell. Why were you so surprised That you never saw the stranger? Did you ever let your lover see The stranger in yourself?"

"I don't want clever conversation I never want to work that hard. I just want someone that I can talk to I want you just the way you are. I need to know that you will always be The same old someone that I knew What will it take till you believe in me The way that I believe in you."

"I remember those days hanging out At the village green Engineer boots, leather jackets And tight blue jeans Drop a dime in the box play the Song about New Orleans Cold beer, hot lights My sweet romantic teenage nights."

"Brenda and Eddie were the popular steadies And the king and the queen of the prom Riding around with the car top down and the radio on Nobody looked any finer Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner We never knew we could want more than that out of life Surely Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive."

"Brenda and Eddie had had it already By the summer of '75 From the high to the low To the end of the show For the rest of their lives. They couldn't go back to the greasers. The best they could do was pick up the pieces. We always knew they would both find a way to get by. That's all I heard about Brenda and Eddie. Can't tell you more than I told you already. And here we are wavin' Brenda and Eddie goodbye."

"But you know you can't always see when you're right You got your passion you got your pride But don't you know only fools are satisfied? Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true When will you realize Vienna waits for you?"

"You might have heard I run with a dangerous crowd We ain't too pretty we ain't too proud We might be laughing a bit too loud But that never hurt no one. Come on Virginia show me a sign Send up a signal I'll throw you the line. The stained-glass curtain you're hiding behind Never lets in the sun. And only the good die young."

"They say there's a heaven for those who will wait Some say it's better but I say it ain't. I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints Sinners are much more fun... And only the good die young."

"She can kill with a smile She can wound with her eyes She can ruin your faith with her casual lies And she only reveals what she wants you to see She hides like a child But she's always a woman to me."

"Oh, she takes care of herself She can wait if she wants She's ahead of her time Oh, and she never gives out And she never gives in She just changes her mind."

"Because you had to be a big shot, didn't you You had to open up your mouth You had to be a big shot, didn't you All your friends were so knocked out You had to have the last word, last night You know what everything's about You had to have a white hot spotlight You had to be a big shot last night."

"Honesty is such a lonely word Everyone is so untrue Honesty is hardly ever heard And mostly what I need from you."

"I can always find someone To say they sympathize If I wear my heart out on my sleeve. But I don't want some pretty face To tell me pretty lies. All I want is someone to believe."

"I don't need you to worry for me cause I'm alright. I don't want you to tell me it's time to come home. I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life. Go ahead with your own life and leave me alone."

"I never said you had to offer me a second chance. I never said I was a victim of circumstance. I still belong, don't get me wrong. And you can speak your mind But not on my time."

"They will tell you, you can't sleep alone in strange place. Then they'll tell you, you can't sleep with somebody else. Ah, but sooner or later you sleep in your own space. Either way, it's okay, you wake with yourself."

"Now think of all the years you tried to Find someone to satisfy you. I might be as crazy as you say. If I'm crazy then it's true That it's all because of you And you wouldn't want me any other way. You may be right I may be crazy. But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for. It's too late to fight It's too late to change me. You may be wrong for all I know But you may be right."

"It's just a fantasy It's not the real thing It's just a fantasy It's not the real thing. But sometimes a fantasy Is all you need."

"All your life you had to stand in line Still you’re standing on your feet. All your choices made you change your mind Now your calendar's complete. Don't wait for answers Just take your chances Don't ask me why."

"Yesterday you were an only child Now your ghosts have gone away. You can kill them in the classic style. Now you, "parlez vous francais" Don't look for answers You took your chances Don't ask my why."

"What's the matter with the crowd I'm seeing? "Don't you know that they're out of touch?" Should I try to be a straight 'A' student? "If you are then you think too much. Don't you know about the new fashion honey? All you need are looks and a whole lotta money." It's the next phase, new wave , dance craze, anyways It's still rock and roll to me. Everybody's talkin' 'bout the new sound Funny, but it's still rock and roll to me."

"Every child had a pretty good shot To get at least as far as their old man got But something happened on the way to that place They threw an American flag in our face."

"Well I'm living here in Allentown And it's hard to keep a good man down But I won't be getting up today."

"You have to learn to pace yourself. Pressure. You're just like everybody else. Pressure. You've only had to run so far, So good. But you will come to a place Where the only thing you feel Are loaded guns in your face. And you'll have to deal with Pressure."

"We held the coastline They held the highlands And they were sharp As sharp as knives They heard the hum of our motors They counted the rotors And waited for us to arrive. And we would all go down together We said we'd all go down together Yes we would all go down together."

"You don't have to start a fight I'm a man who can't say no If you've got a little risky business Just point me where you want to go Take me to the power Take me to the heat Take me to the cleaners If it's open to the street Something's got to pay off Something's got to break Someone's got a fortune that they're begging Me to take."

"Some people stay far away from the door If there's a chance of it opening up They hear a voice in the hall outside And hope that it just passes by. Some people live with the fear of a touch And the anger of having been a fool. They will not listen to anyone So nobody tells them a lie."

"Some people hope for a miracle cure Some people just accept the world as it is. But I'm not willing to lay down and die Because I am an innocent man."

"If you said goodbye to me tonight There would still be music left to write. What else could I do? I'm so inspired by you. That hasn't happened for the longest time."

"I don't care what consequence it brings I have been a fool for lesser things. I want you so bad. I think you ought to know that I intend to hold you for The longest time."

"Didn't I say I wasn't ready for romance? Didn't we promise we would only be friends? And so we danced, though it was only a slow dance. I started breaking my promises right there and then.Didn't I swear there would be no complications? Didn't you want someone who's seen it all before? Now that you're here, it's not the same situation, Suddenly, I don't remember the rules anymore.This night is mine. It's only you and I. Tomorrow is a long time away; This night can last forever."

"Listen boy Don't want to see you let a good thing Slip away. You know I don't like watching Anybody make the same mistakes I made. She's a real nice girl And she's always there for you. But a nice girl wouldn't tell you what you should do."

"Tell her about it Tell her everything you feel Give her every reason to accept That you're for real. Tell her about it. Tell her all your crazy dreams. Let her know you need her Let her know how much she means."

"Tell her about it Let her know how much you care When she can't be with you Tell her you wish you were there. Tell her about it. Every day before you leave Pay her some attention Give her something to believe."

"Uptown girl She's been living in her uptown world. I bet she never had a backstreet guy I bet her mama never told her why. I'm gonna try for an uptown girl. She's been living in her white bread world As long as anyone with hot blood can And now she's looking for a downtown man That's what I am."

"I know the moment isn't right To tell the girl a comical line To keep the conversation light I guess I'm just frightened out of my mind. But if that's how I feel Then it's the best feeling I've ever known It's undeniably real Leave a tender moment alone."

"Learned stickball as a formal education. Lost a lot of fights But it taught me how to lose O.K.. Oh, I heard about sex But not enough. I found you could dance And still look tough anyway. Oh yes I did. I found out a man ain't just being macho. Ate an awful lot of late night drive-in food, drank a lot of take home pay. I thought I was the Duke of Earl When I made it with a red-haired girl In the Chevrolet."

"You can get just so much From a good thing. You can linger too long In your dreams. Say goodbye to the Oldies but goodies. You know the good ole days weren't always good, And tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems."

"I told you my reasons For the whole revival. Now I'm going outside to have An ice cold beer in the shade. Oh, I'm going to listen to my 45's. Ain't it wonderful to be alive When the rock 'n' roll plays, yeah. When the memory stays, yeah. I'm keeping the faith. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Keeping the faith."

"You're having a hard time and lately you don't feel so good; You're getting a bad reputation in your neighborhood. It's alright, it's alright; Sometimes that's what it takes. You're only human, you're allowed to make your share of mistakes."

"Don't forget your second wind; Sooner or later you'll get your second wind. It's not always easy to be living in this world of pain. You're gonna be crashing into stone walls again and again. It's alright, it's alright."

"I'm young enough to still see the passionate boy I used to be. But I'm old enough to say I got a good look at the other side. I know we got to work real hard, maybe even for the rest of our lives. But right now I just want to take what I can Get tonight.While the night is still young, I want to keep making love to you, While the night is still young."

"This is the time to remember 'Cause it will not last forever. These are the days to hold on to 'Cause we won't, although we'll want to. This is the time, But time is gonna change. You've given me the best of you But now I need the rest of you."

"Some love is just a lie of the heart The cold remains of what began with a passionate start. And they may not want it to end But it will, it's just a question of when. I've lived long enough to have learned The closer you get to the fire the more you get burned. But that won't happen to us Because it's always been a matter of trust."

"She's got style and she's got her own money So she's not another honey you can quickly disarm She's got the eyes that make you realize She won't be hypnotized by your usual charm. You've got your plan of attack That won't attract the modern woman When you're an old fashioned man She understands the things you're doin' She's a modern woman."

"Late at night When it's dark and cold I reach out For someone to hold When I'm blue When I'm lonely She comes through She's the only one who can My baby grand Is all I need."

"They say that no one's gonna play this on the radio They said the melancholy blues were dead and gone But only songs like these Played in minor keys Keep those memories holding on."

"I'm so romantic I'm such a passionate man Sometimes I panic What if nobody finds out who I am?"

"We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No we didn't light it But we tried to fight it."

"I've got bills to pay and children who need clothes. I know there's fish out there but where God only knows. They say these waters aren't what they used to be. But I've got people back on land who count on me."

"Sometimes I'm tired, sometimes I'm shot. Sometimes I don't know how much more I've got. Maybe I'm headed over the hill Maybe I've set myself up for the kill. Tell me how much do you think you can take Until the heart in you is starting to break? Sometimes it feels like it will."

"Well I'm shameless when it comes to loving you. I'd do anything you want me to I'd do anything at all. And I'm standing here for all the world to see There ain't that much left of me That has very far to fall."

"And so my child and I came to this place To meet him eye to eye and face to face. He made my daughter laugh, then we embraced. We never knew what friends we had Until we came to Leningrad."

"But darling there you go, slipping away into a state of grace Granted, this world is not a perfect place. Still it's the world that I'm in. Here I am talking while you don't hear a word I say. Knowing you're watching me from far away Somewhere that I've never been."

"And every time I've held a rose It seems I only felt the thorns. And so it goes, and so it goes. And so will you soon I suppose."

"I've seen those big machines come rolling through the quiet pines. Blue suits and bankers with their Volvos and their valentines. Give us this day our daily discount outlet merchandise. Raise up a multiplex and we will make a sacrifice. Now we're gonna get the big business. Now we're gonna get the real thing. Everybody's all excited about it."

"Advice is cheap you can take it from me. It's yours to keep 'cause opinions are free. Nobody knows about the trouble I've seen. Nobody's perfect, mister, nobody's clean. It cost too much and takes too long to find out too late. Some words are not heard 'til after they're spoken. Your role was protective, your soul was too defective. Some people just don't have a heart to be broken."

"We could have gone all the way to the Great Wall of China If you'd only had a little more faith in me. In lieu of diamonds, gold and platinum, reminders will still shine bright. All the king's men and all the king's horses Can't put you together the way you used to be. We could have been standing on the Great Wall of China."

"These days there's a million ways To be pulled and torn, to be misdirected. These times there are sins and crimes On the morning shows for the disconnected. I look and I write my book And I walk away with the wrong impressions. I don't care 'cause I've done my share. And I need some time for my own obsessions It doesn't matter, I've let that life go by. It's been forgotten 'cause all I wanted was you."

"Some days I have to give right in to the blues Despite how I try to keep fightin'. It's a sure shot I'm going to lose. And I'll tell you why. You think I'm crazy. It's such a sad composition. But can you blame me For what's been causing my bad disposition? Ain't nothing new with my blue situation And nothing's fine it's just a minor variation."

"Some things were perfectly clear, seen with the vision of youth. No doubts and nothing to fear, I claimed the corner on truth. These days it's harder to say I know what I'm fighting for. My faith is falling away. I'm not that sure anymore. Shades of grey wherever I go The more I find out the less that I know. Black and white is how it should be But shades of grey are the colors I see."

"She waits for me at night, she waits for me in silence. She gives me all her tenderness and takes away my pain. And so far she hasn't run, though I swear she's had her moments. She still believes in miracles while others cry in vain."

"It's all about soul. It's all about faith and a deeper devotion. It's all about soul. 'Cause under the love is a stronger emotion. She's got to be strong 'Cause so many things getting out of control Should drive her away. So why does she stay? It's all about soul."

"Goodnight, my angel Time to close your eyes. And save these questions for another day. I think I know what you've been asking me. I think you know what I've been trying to say. I promised I would never leave you. And you should always know Wherever you may go No matter where you are I never will be far away."

"Goodnight, my angel Now it's time to dream. And dream how wonderful your life will be. Someday your child may cry And if you sing this lullabye Then in your heart There will always be a part of me. Someday we'll all be gone. But lullabyes go on and on... They never die. That's how you And I Will be."

"In the middle of the night I go walking in my sleep Through the valley of fear To a river so deep. And I've been searching for something Taken out of my soul Something I would never lose Something somebody stole."

"Good evening. This is your Captain We are about to attempt a crash landing... Place your tray tables in their upright, locked position Your Captain says: Put your head on your knees Your Captain says: Put your head in your hands... We are going down We are all going down, together... Standby."

"Uh – this is your Captain again You know, I've got a funny feeling I've seen this all before Why? Cause, I'm a caveman Why? Cause, I've got eyes in the back of my head Why? It's the heat. Standby This is the time. And this is the record of the time"

"Golden cities. Golden towns And long cars, in long lines and great big signs And they all say: Hallelujah. Yodellayheehoo Every man for himself. Ooo coo coo Golden cities. Golden towns. Thanks for the ride Big Science. Hallelujah. Big Science. Yodellayheehoo"

"Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha... Hello? This is your mother, are you there? Are you coming home?...Hello? Is anybody home? Well, you don't know me, but I know you And I've got a message to give to you And I said: okay, who is this really? And the voice said: This is the hand, the hand that takes...Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night Shall stay these couriers from the swift completion Of their appointed rounds"

"Let X equal X You know, it could be you It's a sky-blue sky The satellites are out tonight Let X equal X...You know, I could write a book And this book would be thick enough to stun an ox 'cause I can see the future, and it's a place... Thanks for all the presents... Thanks for introducing me to the Chief"

"She said, it looks Don't you think it looks a lot like rain? He said, isn't it? Isn't it just, isn't it just like a woman? She said, it's hard It's just hard, it's just kind of hard to say"

"Paradise Is exactly like Where you are right now Only much much Better."

"And he said: Now, I'm the Soul Doctor, and you know, language is a virus from outer space, and hearing your name is better than seeing your face."

"And you know the reason I really love the stars is that we cannot hurt them. We can't burn them or melt them or make them overflow. We can't flood them or blow them up or turn them out. But we are reaching for them. We are reaching for them."

"[If] you don't have any soul and you don't have any talent, jazz is what you should do. ... any fool can do it; all you gotta do is practice."

"This instrument is so easy, its a joke."

"Well, dust off your thinking caps Solar powered plastic plants Pretty pictures of things we ate We are only what we hate But in the long run we have found Silent films are full of sound Inaudibly free Slow down everyone You're moving too fast Frames can't catch you when You're moving like that"

"Inaudible melodies Serve narrational strategies Unobtrusive tones Help to notice nothing but the zone Of visual relevancy Frame-lines tell me what to see Chopping like an axe Or maybe Eisenstein should just relax"

"Well, Plato's cave is full of freaks Demanding refunds for the things they've seen I wish they could believe In all the things that never made the screen"

"Well I know some people's they got a little less than nothing But still find some to spare And other people got more than they could use But they don't share And some people got problems man They got awful complications Other people got perfect situations With no provocation"

"Here comes another one, just like the other one Looking at himself but wishing he was someone else Because the posters on the wall they don't look like him And so he ties it up he tucks it in, he pulls it back and gives a grin Laughing at himself because he knows he ain't loved at all He knows he ain't loved at all"

"You're breaking your mind By killing the time that kills you But you can't blame the time When its only in your mind"

"It seems to me that maybe, It pretty much always means no So don't tell me you might just let it go And often times we're lazy It seems to stand in my way Cause no one no not no one Likes to be let down"

"I know she loves the sunrise No longer sees it with her sleeping eyes And I know that when she said she's gonna try Well it might not work because of other ties and I know she usually has some other ties And I wouldn't want to break 'em, nah, I wouldn't want to break 'em Maybe she'll help me to untie this but Until then well, I'm gonna have to lie too"

"His dreams are like commercials But her dreams are picture perfect and Our dreams are so related though they're often underestimated"

"Well I was eating lunch at the D. L. G. When this little girl came and she sat next to me I never seen nobody move the way she did Well she did and she does and she'll do it again. When you move like a jellyfish Rhythm don't mean nothing You go with the flow You don't stop Move like a jellyfish Rhythm is nothing You go with the flow You don't stop"

"She's the one that stumbles when she talks about The seven foreign films that she's checked out Such a fortunate fool She's just too good to be true She's such a fortunate fool"

"A billion people died on the news tonight But not so many cried at the terrible sight Well mama said It's just make believe You can't believe everything you see So baby close your eyes to the lullabies On the news tonight"

"Why don't the newscasters cry when they read about people who die? At least they could be decent enough to put just a tear in their eyes."

"We used to laugh a lot But only because we thought That everything good always would remain Nothing's gonna change there's no need to complain."

"Look who's laughing now that you've wasted How many years and you've barely even tasted Anything remotely close to Everything you've boasted about Look who's crying now."

"Losing hope is easy When your only friend is gone And every time you look around Well, it all, it all just seems to change But hanging on is easy When you've got a friend to call When nothings making sense at all You're not the only one that's afraid of change"

"Look at all those fancy clothes but these could keep us warm just like those and what about your soul, is it cold is it straight from the mold and ready to be sold and cars and phones and diamond rings, bling bling those are only removeable things and what about your mind, does it shine oh are there things that concern you more than your time"

"And I don't pretend to know what you know no no now please don't pretend to know what's on my mind if we already knew everything that everybody knows we would have nothing to learn tonight and we would have nothing to show tonight oh but everybody thinks that everybody knows about everybody else nobody knows anything about themselves cause they're all worried about everybody else."

"You can't blame me sure the killer was my son but I didn't teach him to pull the trigger of the gun It's the killing on this tv screen you can't blame me it's those images he's seen. Well you can't blame me says the media man Well I wasn't the one who came up with the plan And I just point my camera at what the people want to see Man it's a two way mirror and you can't blame me."

"It was you it was me it was every man We've all got the blood on our hands We only receive what we demand and if we want hell then hells what we'll have."

"Its always better when we're together Somewhere in between together Its always better when we're together Yeah, its always better when we're together."

"Love is the answer at least for most of the questions in my heart Like: why are we here? And where do we go? And how come it's so hard? It's not always easy and sometimes life can be deceiving I'll tell you one thing its always better when we're together."

"Never knowing Shocking but we're nothing We're just moments We're Clever but we're clueless We're just human Amusing but confusing But the truth is All we got is questions We'll Never Know."

"The telephone is singing Ringing it's too early Don't pick it up We don't need to we got everything We need right here And everything we need is enough Just so easy When the whole world fits inside of your arms Don't really need to pay attention to the alarm."

"Where'd all the good people go? I've been changin' channels I don't see them on the TV shows Where'd all the good people go? We got heaps and heaps of what we sow."

"They got this and that with a rattle a tat. Testing, one, two, man whatcha gonna do? Bad news misused, got too much to lose. Give me some truth now, whose side are we on? Whatever you say. Turn on the boob tube, I’m in the mood to obey. So lead me astray."

"And know that if I knew all of the answers I would Not hold them from you. You'd Know all the things that I'd know We told each other, there is no other way."

"Must I always be waiting, waiting on you? Must I always be playing, playing the fool?"

"Well if I was in your position I'd put down all my ammunition I'd wondered why'd it take me so long. But Lord knows that I'm not you And if I was I wouldn't be so cruel Cause waiting on love ain't so easy to do."

"Well I guess you could say That he don't even know where to begin Cause he looked both ways but he was so afraid Diggin' deeper through the ditch With every chance he missed And the mess he made Cause hate is such a strong word And every brick he laid A mistake they say That his walls are getting taller His world is getting smaller."

"Who’s to say what’s impossible? Well they forgot this world keeps spinning. And with each new day, I can feel a change in everything. And as the surface breaks, reflections fade. But in some ways they remain the same. And as my mind begins to spread it’s wings There’s no stopping curiosity."

"I want to turn the whole thing upside down. I’ll find the things they say just can’t be found. I’ll share this love I find with everyone. We’ll sing and dance to mother nature’s songs. I don’t want this feeling to go away."

"With everything ahead of us We left everything behind. But nothing that we needed; At least not at this time. And now the feeling that I’m feeling, Well it’s feeling like my life is finally mine. With nothing to go back to we just continue to drive."

"Well I’m just people watching The other people watching me. And we’re all people watching The other people watching we."

"And the water below gives a gift to the sky And the clouds give back every time they cry And make the grass grow green beneath my toes."

"When you’re so lonely lying in bed, Night’s closed it’s eyes but you can’t rest your head. Everyone’s sleeping all through the house, You wish you could dream but forgot to somehow. Sing this lullaby to yourself."

"Let me show you how to drive me crazy, Let me show you how to make me feel so good, Let me show you how to take me to the edge of the stars and back again. You've gotta show me how to drive you crazy, You've gotta show me all the things you wanna happen to you, We've gotta tell each other everything, we always wanted someone to do."

"It's all we ever wanted And all we'll ever need And now it's slipping through our fingers Faster than the speed of night."

"I have travelled across the universe through the years to find her. Sometimes going all the way is just a start..."

"I've been called over the top. How silly. If you don't go over the top, you can't see what's on the other side."

"The sirens are screaming and the fires are howling Way down in the valley tonight. There's a man in the shadows with a gun in his eye And a blade shining oh so bright. There's evil in the air And there's thunder in the sky And a killer's on the bloodshot streets."

"Oh baby you're the only thing in this whole world That's pure and good and right And wherever you are and wherever you go There's always gonna be some light."

"Like a bat out of Hell I'll be gone when the morning comes. But when the day is done And the sun goes down And the moonlight's shining through Then like a sinner before the gates of heaven I'll come crawling on back to you."

"Nothing ever grows in this rotten old hole And everything is stunted and lost And nothing really rocks and nothing really rolls And nothing's ever worth the cost. And I know that I'm damned if I never get out And maybe I'm damned if I do But with every other beat I got left in my heart You know I'd rather be damned with you."

"Then I'm dying at the bottom of a pit in the blazing sun All torn and twisted at the foot of a burning bike And I think somebody somewhere must be tolling a bell And the last thing I see is my heart, Still beating, Breaking out of my body And flying away Like a bat out of Hell."

"I never had a girl Looking any better than you did And all the kids at school They were wishing they were me that night."

"It never felt so good, it never felt so right And we're glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife."

"Though it's cold and lonely in the deep dark night I can see paradise by the dashboard light."

"Ain't no doubt about it We were doubly blessed Cause we were barely seventeen And we were barely dressed."

"Stop right there! I gotta know right now! Before we go any further — Do you love me? Will you love me forever?"

"Baby, baby let me sleep on it Let me sleep on it And I'll give you my answer in the morning..."

"So now I'm praying for the end of time To hurry up and arrive Cause if I gotta spend another minute with you I don't think that I can really survive. I'll never break my promise or forget my vow But God only knows what I can do right now. I'm praying for the end of time It's all that I can do Praying for the end of time, so I can end my time with you!"

"Every now and then I get a little bit nervous that the best of all the years have gone by. Turn around Every now and then I get a little bit terrified and then I see the look in your eyes. Turn around bright eyes. Every now and then I fall apart."

"I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark We're living in a powder keg and giving off sparks. I really need you tonight Forever's gonna start tonight Forever's gonna start tonight."

"Once upon a time I was falling in love But now I'm only falling apart There's nothing I can do A total eclipse of the heart Once upon a time there was light in my life But now there's only love in the dark Nothing I can say A total eclipse of the heart."

"I know just how to fake it And I know just how to scheme I know just when to face the truth And then I know just when to dream. And I know just where to touch you And I know just what to prove I know when to pull you closer And I know when to let you loose. And I know the night is fading And I know the time's gonna fly And I'm never gonna tell you everything I gotta tell you But I know I've got to give it a try. And I know the roads to riches And I know the ways to fame I know all the rules and then I know how to break'em And then I always know the name of the game But I don't know how to leave you And I'll never let you fall And I don't know how you do it Making love out of nothing at all."

"Every time I see you, all the rays of the sun Are streaming through the waves in your hair And every star in the sky is taking aim at your eyes Like a spotlight."

"You can take the darkness from the deep of the night And turn it to a beacon burning endlessly bright I gotta follow it 'cause everything I know Well, it's nothing 'till I give it to you."

"I'm never gonna make it without you Do you really wanna see me crawl ? And I'm never gonna make it like you do Making love out of nothing at all."

"The sea is whipping the sky The sky is whipping the sea You can hide away forever from the storm But you'll never hide away from me."

"The icy cold will cut us like a knife in the dark And we may lose everything in the wind But the Northern Lights are burning And they're giving off sparks."

"I know that I'm gonna be like this forever I'm never gonna be what I should And you think that I'll be bad for just a little while But I know that I'll be bad for good."

"For the good of believing in a life after birth For the good of your body so bright For the good of the search for some heaven on earth For the good of one hell of a night, for the good of one hell of a night."

"I'll never forget the way you feel right now — Oh no — no way — I would do anything for love But I won't do that."

"But it was long ago and it was far away, Oh god, it seems so very far. And if life is just a highway Then the soul is just a car.And objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are."

"And we’ll never be as young as we are right now"

"Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite."

"It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work."

"Image…that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough."

"Who brought this to pass? Who has brought the flaming imperial anger? Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums? Barbarous kings. A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn, A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom, Three hundred and sixty thousand, And sorrow, sorrow like rain."

"One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns."

"Poetry must be as well written as prose."

"It has been complained, with some justice, that I dump my note-books on the public."

"Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists."

"The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation."

"Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one "Sordello.""

"Make it new!"

"Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."

"Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."

"But the one thing you shd. not do is suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY."

"Our own consciousness is incapable of having produced the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence"

"If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good."

"Both in Greece and in Provence the poetry attained its highest rhythmic and metrical brilliance at times when the arts of verse and music were most closely knit together, when each thing done by the poet had some definite musical urge or necessity bound up within it."

"My worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along."

"I never was. When I left the hospital I was still in America and all America is an insane asylum."

"The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity."

"Not one man in a thousand can be aroused to an interest in economics until he definitely suffers from the effects of an evil system."

"It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse."

"If a man have not order within him He can not spread order about him; And if a man have not order within him His family will not act with due order; And if the prince have not order within him He can not put order in his dominions."

"And even I can remember A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, I mean, for things they didn't know, But that time seems to be passing."

"Without character you will be unable to play on that instrument"

"The blossoms of the apricot blow from the east to the west, And I have tried to keep them from falling."

"With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting [...] with usura hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall [...] no picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly"

"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage"

"The ant's a centaur in his dragon world."

"Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place"

"How mean thy hates Fostered in falsity [...] Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity"

"To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame This is not vanity. Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered..."

"You damn sadist!" said mr. cummings, "you try to make people think."

"The temple is holy because it is not for sale."

"Pride, jealousy and possessiveness 3 pains of hell"

"And of man seeking good, doing evil."

"But the beauty is not the madness Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me. And I am not a demigod, I cannot make it cohere."

"Many errors, a little rightness."

"I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak. that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made."

"Here is the core of evil, the burning hell without let-up, The canker corrupting all things, Fafnir the worm, Syphilis of the State, of all kingdoms Wart of the common-weal, Wenn-maker, corrupter of all things Darkness the defiler Twin evil of envy, Snake of the seven heads, Hydra, entering all things Passing the doors of temples defiling the grove of Paphos, neschek, the crawling evil, slime, the corrupter of all things, Poisoner of the fount, of all fountains, neschek, The serpent, evil against Nature's increase, Against beauty"

"A pity that poets have used symbol and metaphor and no man learned anything from them for their speaking in figures"

"All other sins are open, Usura alone not understood."

"And for one beautiful day there was peace."

"To be men not destroyers"

"A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him."

"The author's conviction on this day of the New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music."

"Literature is news that STAYS news."

"Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it."

"The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts."

"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."

"AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN."

"Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding."

"Hence "the serious artist," whom Pound describes in an early essay as the maintainer of the mental health of the state, has concerns identical with the serious philosopher, the serious ruler, the serious editor or publisher, the serious teacher. He keeps up values."

"His intelligence indeed has been a flowering of Western self‐awareness, with life‐bestowing and poisonous blossoms intermingled, as if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant variety were both at once made manifest in it."

"Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound."

"Personally I admire several writers (Céline, for instance) who have gone over to the Fascists, and many others whose political outlook I strongly object to. But one has the right to expect ordinary decency of a poet. I never listened to Pound’s broadcasts, but I often read them in the B.B.C. Monitoring Reports, and they were intellectually and morally disgusting. Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person. People who go in for that kind of thing must take the consequences."

"I have been very excited by Ezra Pound's work with Chinese. People don't realize how much of Chinese culture is part of American culture. I mean, all those transcendentalists at the beginning of American writing."

"A musician once asked Ezra Pound if there was anywhere one could get all of poetry, in the sense that one could get all of music in Bach. Pound's response was that if a person would take the trouble really to learn Greek, he could get all of it, or nearly all of it, in Homer."

"Most of the great critics of English poetry have also been poets: Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to name a few."

"Pound's ideas about Russian communism developed in two directions. First, he felt that there were basic similarities between the Russian and the fascist revolutions. Second, he felt a great deal of admiration for Lenin as a man of action in the mold of his hero, Mussolini (this was not an entirely accidental comparison, for the contemporary figure most admired by Mussolini was Lenin)."

"Pound's fascism-crazed mind"

"The word "beauty" is as easy to use as the word "degenerate." Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you."

"Music is one of the ways that God has of beating in on man."

"Stand up and take your dissonance like a man."

"There is a great Man living in this country — a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives."

"[Ives] was exploring the 1960s during the heyday of Strauss and Debussy. polytonality; atonality; tone clusters; perspectivistic effects; chance; statistical composition; permutation; add-a-part, practical-joke, and improvisatory music: these were ives’ discoveries a half-century ago as he quietly set about devouring the contemporary cake before the rest of us even found a seat at the same table."

"Swanee! How I love you, how I love you, My dear ol' Swanee! I'd give the world to be Among the folks in D-I-X-I-E"

"Picture you upon my knee, Just tea for two and two for tea"

"Sometimes I'm happy sometimes I'm blue my disposition depends on you."

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true."

"Such close observations of apes and birds and dolphins remind us that humanity is part of a great animal kingdom. All species within this kingdom differ from one another in significant ways, to be sure, but the kingdom does not seem to be organized on the superior/inferior hierarchy. Species are merely different from one another; they are not better than, nor more or less advanced than, each other. The core experience of all animal life is strikingly similar."

"This country is a one-party country. Half of it is called Republican and half is called Democrat. It doesn't make any difference. All the really good ideas belong to the Libertarians."

"In today's anti-drug climate, people don't want to hear about the commercial potential of marijuana. The reason is that the flowering top of a female hemp plant contains a drug. But from 1842 through the 1890s a powerful concentrated extract of marijuana was the second most prescribed drug in the United States. In all that time the medical literature didn't list any of the ill effects claimed by today's drug warriors."

"If hemp could supply the energy needs of the United States, its value would be inestimable. Now that the drug czar is in final retreat, America has an opportunity to, once and for all, say farewell to the Exxon Valdez, Saddam Hussein and a prohibitively expensive brinkmanship in the desert sands of Saudi Arabia."

"A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes."

"I've always thought that the stereotype of the dirty old man is really the creation of a dirty young man who wants the field to himself."

"I have no ego investment in being on the air. I don't knock others for whom that kind of attention is like oxygen, but I don't miss anything about it."

"To have a facility like this really adds a world-class potential (to the area), … I'm sure I'll be out here to see some shows."

"My favorite sport is Scrabble."

"If I could be a vegetable, I'd be a pumpkin. It's realistically the only vegetable you can use as a weapon, or in any manner of defense."

"Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor. Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm."

"Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes."

"Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs. I was the first composer to explore, so to speak, musical outer space."

"I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena. As a child, I was tremendously impressed by the qualities and character of the granite I found in Burgundy, where I often visited my grandfather...So I was always in touch with things of stone and with this kind of pure structural architecture — without frills or unnecessary decoration. All of this became an integral part of my thinking at a very early stage."

"There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces. The form of the work is a consequence of this interaction. Possible musical forms are as limitless as the exterior forms of crystals."

"I had an upright — it took me years and years to get enough bread to get it... I'm from Florida, so one morning I woke up, go in the corner and the bass is in a hundred pieces, cause the humidity is so bad, I mean, the upright just blew up. I said forget it, man, I can't afford this any more. So I went out, got a knife and took all the frets out of my Fender. That was it."

"Give me a gig!"

"I was playing drums, and I had broken my wrist very bad playing football, and the bass player in the band... he wanted to split. So I just went to the bass; I went from Drums over to Bass. That was it. I was playing the bass within a week."

"I took the frets out of my bass after I was getting into jazz a lot and I wanted to have that upright sound."

"I never practiced a fretless ever, because the strings eat the neck up. So I would only play it on gigs."

"Saying Pastorius is the greatest jazz-based bassist of all time would not be a stretch. Unfortunately, Pastorius' off-stage demons seemed to get in the way of sustaining that greatness. In addition to his drug addiction, Pastorius dealt with bipolar disorder and harbored a nasty temper. Pastorius, who collaborated with the likes of Joni Mitchell and Ian Hunter, died in 1987 at 35 due to injuries suffered in a bar fight, ending a celebrated musical career where his innovative funk harmonies on the electric bass are still an influence on bassists to this day."

"A fiery and muscular player, Jaco Pastorius, who passed away in 1987 at the age of 35, remains one of the most influential electric bassists in jazz. His 1975 self-titled debut album is hailed by some as the best jazz bass album ever; it should be required listening for any aspiring bass player, especially his interpretation of Charlie Parker's "Donna Lee," or his harmonic work on "Continuum" and "Portrait of Tracy." Pastorius used to say he was the greatest bass player in the world, and dude could back it up with his virtuosic abilities."

"It's safe to say that in the past, games have wanted to be like movies, but we all know now that they aren't movies and they never will be. Games are often bigger, richer and more time consuming."

"As the crash was occurring, I remember that I felt no fear although I was obviously concerned for the people in cars that were headed in my direction. I simply just acknowledged to myself that I've had a good life and I would soon have to say goodbye to all of it in a matter of seconds."

"My secret desire is for the whole world to eventually play games and for games to have the kind of influence that books and movies do. Games are a great place for the planet's collective subconscious to grow as we further our understanding of each other."

"I got one entire song from fortune cookies (Land of Sunshine). On another one, I took words from different Frank Sinatra songs and pasted them together. Another one, I was just driving around and there was a piece of paper on the ground, so I stole it."

"Puffy's the only guy who's jealous. "All drummers want to be singers. I think it's a myth that the singer needs to be the focus. Bands perpetuate that myth. With somebody like Sebastian Bach it makes sense. Look at him. He could be in an Avon ad."

"It's (RV) about a slob sitting around who doesn't do anything. I kind of identify with it."

"Big Jim is over and out, as far as I am concerned."

"Trey Spruance didn't want to tour for ages. And Dean Menta has always been our guitar-roadie during Angel Dust, and I remember him playing fantastically during soundchecks. During each gig, he was watching from the side of the stage, seeing Big Jim play stuff that he could play better."

"There's a lot of positive stuff to say about him... Why can't I think of any now? (laughs) Oh, here's something positive: Big Jim's best trait of character was that he has always been himself... which was his worst trait of character at the same time."

"Oh, have you seen Beavis and Butt-Head when they watch one of our videos and Beavis goes: 'These guys sound just like the Chili Peppers?' As if I haven't heard that one before!""

"Recently, a girl chained herself to me with hand-cuffs after a gig, just because I refused to talk to her. I politely declined, though. I am a well-bred boy. I don't want to be too specific, but... it got pretty ugly."

"Despite the aural onslaught, King (For A Day) is not an assault I think it's us being us, more than anything. I think we finally had the resources to be us on this record."

"Revenge is good. I think revenge is healthy too, and if you can use music in that way, a sort of therapeutic way for yourself, it can't do any harm. So if King (For A Day...Fool For A Lifetime) is angry in any way, it's angry in a random, chaotic, healthy way. Like the guy who goes into a building, shoots a bunch of holes in the wall and then leaves. He didn't kill anybody."

"We just wanna be the happy bums that we are. That's all."

"When you live in a capitalistic society, the currency of the dissemination of information goes through capitalistic channels. Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes & Noble? No, because that's where people buy their books. We're not interested in preaching to just the converted. It's great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists, but it's also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart."

"One does not have to be an honours grad in political science from Harvard University to recognise the unethical and inhumane nature of this administration but well, I happen to be an honours grad in political science from Harvard University, so I can confirm that for you"

"It'll start with a spark, and a great fire will grow."

"In my nightmares the streets are aflame, and in my dreams it's much the same."

"Sacrifice and neon lights slave ships don't wait. Love many, trust few, and don't be late"

"Yeah, I support my troopsThey wave black flagsThey wear black masksAll the roads are closedSmoke is rising from the fieldsThe monsters left their cagesAn angel set them free."

"Can you explain to the mothersAnd the fathers of thoseWho come riding home in coffinsIn their military clothes?"

"You don't gotta be loud, son, to be heavy as shit!"

"The skin you're in makes choices for you."

"Thought hard about this next linePretty sure it's true.If you take a step towards freedomIt'll take two steps towards you."

"The piano is always true to me. In times of despair, happiness, and joy, its mood is always my own."

"I am a composer first and foremost, and have always believed that being able to write memorable melodies is what sets musicians apart."

"My songs bring images to the listener's mind. The object is to transport my listeners to another place, some place sacred and spiritual that will make them glad they took the ride."

"Basically, I write from a two person standpoint. First, I let the song take hold and I put down the idea as a raw emotional statement. Then I let it breathe and come back, approaching from more of an objective point of view. This allows me to rediscover the true meaning I intended in the beginning, shedding new light on how I can best represent that to the listener."

"Musically I try to connect a common bridge between such exhilarating feelings as performing at the Acropolis, to the emotions each and every one of us feel everyday. In the end, a good melody will always stand the test of time."

"Music allows a person to express their deepest thoughts, thoughts that cannot be expressed with just words. I am often asked how I begin a song or develop a melody from nothing. That is the spiritual aspect of creating. Finding something deep within yourself that can only be created by you."

"Through instrumental music, I’m allowed to come up with musical ideas that allow the listener to create their own impression of my song. If you add lyrics about a girl in the song, the listener doesn’t have a choice of what the song is about, it’s told to them. My musical writings allow me to express anything. It’s easier for me to tell a story of something I’ve encountered this way then to verbalize it. And my feelings are explored more in my compositions compared to what I could ever say in a few sentences."

"All the information you need is available to you to have a successful career in music, if you're paying attention, and not closed off to anything. Remember, Perseverance is King."

"A lot of musicians don’t learn the business. You just have to be well-rounded in both areas. You have to understand publishing. You have to understand how you make money, what’s in demand, what helps you make the most out of your talent."

"Time and persistence has shown me that I can succeed at sharing my art with others as a musician while running my own music business. And that kind of success is as good as I could have ever wished for."

"Practice. I used to sit on the edge of my bed with a six-pack of Schlitz Malt talls. My brother would go out at 7pm to party and get laid, and when he'd come back at 3am, I would still be sitting in the same place, playing guitar. I did that for years — I still do that."

"I don't like doing interviews, I don't like doing what I'm doing right now. I'd rather be at home playing my guitar."

"Playing together without having to compromise our sound was a dream come true."

"In 1971, a young Eddie witnessed Page’s one-handed solo for Heartbreaker, “took the idea and ran with it”. And then some."

"Eddie could play his borrowed Clapton licks at four times their original speed. But describing EVH’s guitar playing as “fast” undervalues it, like describing the Great Pyramid of Giza as “large”. Not just the best soloist on the planet, Eddie was possibly even better at rhythm – effortlessly grooving, extremely dynamic, and with the best swing in the game. Debates about whether he invented tapping (answer: no) are beside the point. Eddie Van Halen also did not invent harmonics, divebombs, palm muting, legato, or high gain tones, but no one had combined them seamlessly into one coherent guitar style, let alone perfected it on their debut album. [...] Where he hits a wrong note, he styles it out and keeps on wailing. Like the gymnast Simone Biles, no matter what acrobatics happen in the air, he always sticks the landing."

"[Eddie's solos are] short, concise and brilliantly crafted. They’re not just about speed. He can do a bit of something that’s quite gentle, and then throw in something that just blows you away because of the sheer pace of it for a second—and then he goes back to something else."

"Like Jimi Hendrix a decade earlier, Van Halen caused guitarists to look at their instruments in an entirely new way, and, arguably, no single guitarist has had such universal impact since."

"It’s an incredible technique for what he does. I can’t do it. I can’t smile like him either."

"Eddie’s smile reflects the sheer exuberance bursting from the grooves on the first Van Halen album. [...] Eddie’s licks had soul, even when he was showing off. Then there was the tone. It’s doubtful the electric guitar has ever sounded better. Guitarists have devoted their lives to trying to discover how it was done. [...] The 23-year-old Eddie didn’t just invent 80s rock guitar; he did it in a way that no one would ever surpass. A generation of shredders took his technique to new heights, but no one had the tone or the vibe, and no one else looked like they were having nearly as much fun."

"In 1978, Edward Van Halen redefined virtuosity on the electric guitar."

""Eruption" changed everything. Sure, it clocked in at less than two minutes and never came close to being a hit. As presented on the first Van Halen album in 1978, it seemed like an instrumental introduction to "You Really Got Me", the band’s debut single. But it was obvious to anyone who heard the Eddie Van Halen masterpiece that the world of rock guitar had changed dramatically. [...] Before Van Halen, guitar heroes were known mainly for their mastery of the blues and ability to pull a rich, vocal tone from their axes. [...] With Eruption, Eddie Van Halen set new standards on both fronts. He not only ripped through demisemiquavers with a speed and clarity that made McLaughlin seem splay-fingered; his mastery of feedback, tremolo and pinged harmonics made his guitar sound as fluid as a synthesizer."

"The incredible speed and consistency of his take on [the tremolo picking] technique has been a source of fascination for 35 years. In Van Halen’s approach, the picking hand hangs suspended in mid-air, with no anchoring or muting at all, and uses a middle-index pick grip to generate positively giant picking movements. It really seems to break all the rules."

"As unpredictable and flamboyant as Hendrix, Van Halen has had an unmeasurable impact on the guitar community. By the mid Eighties, his self-described “brown” sound, over-the-top techniques (including two-handed tapping), and revolutionary trem-bar effects inspired a generation of aspiring guitarists who bought the one-pickup, one-volume-knob, Floyd Rose–equipped Strat-style guitars that Van Halen made famous."

"I admit it worked fairly well but my first reaction was to get up and walk away from the job, but I couldn't. Once you've heard music like that with the picture, it makes your own scoring more difficult to arrive at, it clouds your thinking. Later, as an inside joke, I included a snippet of the Strauss in the score-and some critic pounced on me for stealing. You can´t win."

"The fact that certain composers have been able to create first-class music within the medium of film proves that film music can be as good as the composer is gifted."

"Working to timings and synchronizing your musical thoughts with the film can be stimulating rather than restrictive. Scoring is a limitation but like any limitation is can be made to work for you. Verdi, except for a handful of pieces, worked best when he was 'turned on' by a libretto. The most difficult problem in music is form, and in a film you already have this problem solved for you. You are presented with a basic structure, and a blueprint, and provided the film has been well put together, and well edited, it often suggests its rhythms and tempo. The quality of the music is strictly up to the composer. Many people seem to assume that because film music serves the visual it must be something of secondary value. Well, the function of any art is to serve a purpose in society. For many years, music and painting served religion. The thing to bear in mind is that film is the youngest of the arts, and that scoring is the youngest of the music arts. We have a great deal of development ahead of us."

"You read reviews by top reviewers of films that not only had remarkably interesting scores, but films whose effectiveness was absolutely enhanced, and frequently created by the music, yet the reviewers seem unaware that their emotions and their nervous reactions to the films have been affected by the scoring. This is a serious flaw. Any film reviewer owes it to himself, and the public, to take every element of the film into account"

"It's nice to think about the Golden Age of Hollywood, with the big studios and their fabulous music departments and the hundreds of films coming out every year. But it's gone. In some ways the composer today is more fortunate, provided he can find a good film, because he can attempt more than he could two decades ago. Twelve-tone music was unheard of during Max Steiner's heyday, as were any other avant-garde techniques. Finally, the future of film music rests with the composers themselves. If they take their work seriously and turn out the best that is within them, then perhaps we can persuade not only the public, but the filmmakers that good music is valuable in films. The public is not stupid. If our music survives, which I have no doubt it will, then it will be because it is good."

"Originally I was supposed to do Grand Prix, but I was under contract to 20th Century Fox at that time and Alex North was supposed to do Sand Pebbles, but he got sick, so Fox preempted me out of Grand Prix, and to my good fortune, I got to do Sand Pebbles. It was my first time working with Robert Wise and it was a great experience."

"Jerry Goldsmith is an artist who meets all the demands upon the composer in films. He communicates, integrates, subordinates, supports, and designs with discipline."

"I don't wanna get rich — just live good."

"You don't appreciate home until you leave it and, let me tell you, you can't appreciate life till you've almost left it! Some people hope and die with their song still in them. I used to think that happiness resulted when my earnings matched my yearnings! But not anymore!"

"Oh, I just sing like I hurt inside."

"Find one person in the audience and sing to them with all of your heart. And then cast a spell over them. Hoss, if you can't do it with feeling — don't."

"You're alright honey. Anyone who'll stand up to "The Cline" is alright. We're going to be good friends."

"When I find out who stole it I'll take blood, ass and all!"

"Before Dolly, Loretta and Reba, there was Patsy. She was the first female country headliner and one of the first artists in the genre to have crossover pop success, which is basically a pre-requisite in terms of Rock Hall induction. During her prime, Cline was very much on the same level as fellow stars like Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley and is a clear example of the Rock Hall’s need to focus more on women."

"Don't terrorize. Organize. Don't burn. Give kids a chance to learn … The real answer to race problems in this country is education. Not burning and killing. Be ready. Be qualified. Own something. Be somebody. That's Black Power."

"Manhood is what we profess, and what we try to get across."

"A colored is a very frightened-to-death Afro-American. A Negro is one that makes it in the system, and he wants to be white. A nigger, he's loud and boisterous, wants to be seen. Nobody likes a nigger. A black man has pride. He wants to build, he wants to make his race mean something. Wants to have a culture and art forms. And he's not prejudiced. I am a black American man. Now you go ahead and print it."

"Hair is the first thing. And teeth the second. Hair and teeth. A man got those two things he's got it all."

"It doesn't matter how you travel it, it's the same road. It doesn't get any easier when you get bigger, it gets harder. And it will kill you if you let it.""

"Sometimes you struggle so hard to feed your family one way, you forget to feed them the other way, with spiritual nourishment. Everybody needs that."

"When I'm on stage, I'm trying to do one thing: bring people joy. Just like church does. People don't go to church to find trouble, they go there to lose it."

"To make it in life, you and your wife need to be in the same business. That has been my problem all along. My wives didn't know what I was doing. I would come back home from the road to a stranger. That's no good."

"I would warn against anyone marrying a person with more than a ten-year age difference. It almost never works. It is difficult to find things to talk about, to use similar reference points, and to operate at the same speed of life. Another problem is that both sides usually don't want the same things at the same time."

"This is an issue couples have to be straight on and agree on before they walk down that aisle; otherwise there is no way their marriage will survive."

"I'm the most sampled and stolen. What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine, too … I got a song about that … But I'm never gonna release it. Don't want a war with the rappers. If it wasn't good, they wouldn't steal it."

"I'm going away tonight."

"Try me. Try me. And your love will always be true. Oh I need you (I need you). Hold me. Hold me. I want you right here by my side. Hold me. Hold me. And your love we won't hide."

"Come here sister... Papa's in the swing. He ain't too hip... about that new breed babe. He ain't no drag, Papa's got a brand new bag."

"When I hold you in my arms, I know that I can't do no wrong. And when I hold you in my arms, My love can't do me no harm.And I feel nice, like sugar and spice I feel nice, like sugar and spice. So nice, so nice, well I got you."

"This is a mans world. This is a mans world. But it would be nothing, nothing Without a women or a girl."

"When you kiss me, And ya miss me. You hold me tight, Make everything all right. I break out - in a cold sweat heh!"

"Our love is kind of stalled, baby. But it ain't about the sex. I'd trade the roses and the negligees If we could just connect. I go deeper when you look into my eyes. There's a place where neither one of us can hide. And it's up to us to reinvent the game. Love it when you call my name."

"Mama, come here quick, Bring me that lickin' stick. Mama, come here quick, Bring me that lickin' stick. People standin', Standin' in a trance. Sister out in the backyard Doin' the outside dance."

"Look a'here, some people say we got a lot of malice Some say it's a lotta nerve I say we won't quit moving Til we get what we deserve. We've been 'buked and we've been scourned We've been treated bad, talked about As just as sure as you're born But just as sure as it take Two eyes to make a pair, huh Brother, we can't quit until we get our share.Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud."

"Get up, Get on up. Stay on the scene. Get on up, Like a Sex Machine. Get on up, Get up. Shake your arm, Then use your form. Stay on the scene, like a Sex Machine. You gotta have the feeling, Sure as you're born."

"Watch me … watch me! I got it! Watch me … I got it. HEY!I got somethin' that makes me wanna shout. I got somethin' that tells me what it's all about. Huh, I got soul and I'm super bad!"

"The American black person knows something which nobody else in the world knows. To have been where we were, to have paid the price we have paid, to have survived, and to have shaken up the world the way we have is a rare journey. No one else has made it but us. There is a reason that people are listening to James Brown, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin all over the world, and not to somebody from Moscow, Turkey, or England. And the reason is not in our crotch but in our heart, our soul. It's something the world denied and lied about, energy they labeled savage, inferior, and insignificant. But it has been proven that no matter what they labeled it, they cannot do without it."

"[When asked how he's keeping his 12-year marriage to wife Jill fresh] Hookers, drugs. We’re playing the field right now."

"I was in such a state while I was recovering from this surgery and the pain medication that I was on sort of took all the inhibitions out that I may have had. I found that I was ordering things online; big boxes of stuff would arrive at my house."

"I started making movies when I was 20. I started playing piano when I was about 3 years old, so I'm probably a musician first. But when I'm working on a movie, as an actor, I'm an actor - 100 percent. And when I'm on tour, I'm a musician 100 percent."

"New Orleans is a city of paradox. Sin, salvation, sex, sanctification, so intertwined yet so separate."

"Harry is a true musician. He has a massive amount of information that he's dealing with, so he is very comfortable wherever a song goes. Great music is like leaping off a cliff, but some musicians will only go to the precipice. Harry just jumps, which is why playing with him is very liberating."

"Command & Conquer is very much a part of what my style...was founded on, combining the various elements of rock, electronic, hip-hop, and contemporary edge with some orchestral and some what-not—it comes down to not having limitations on what it is you can do, and when you have a project like this that allows you that freedom and that creativity to thrive, you can really take advantage...I think the biggest difference now is, imagine my mindset and the way I was thinking and writing when Command & Conquer first came out, and add about fifteen years experience to that—I think that's what you can expect from Universe at War."

"Metal is back. (concerning the music for the Hierarchy faction of Universe at War: Earth Assault)"

"The first song I ever wrote back then was the song that landed me the job as composer at Westwood Studios, which was remarkable for me at the time. It was basically an acoustic guitar song with electric guitar leads and keyboard strings, and raining sound effects in the background. If I had to compare it to anything, it was probably similar to an interlude Queensryche song. I never released this song before, but I've recently been thinking about re-recording it with the experience I have now and really making it sound proper. Maybe one day."

"(When asked what shaped his musical preferences) That comes from many directions. My parents, relatives, and friends shaped a good part of that, and whatever I heard on the radio and mtv growing up (back when MTV was actually a music channel instead of a teenage reality show channel) and movies I loved, just wherever it came from that exposed me to it I would weed out quickly what I did and didn't care for. My music tastes have always been diverse, though I tried to kid myself at certain times that I only like this or that, no matter what everything I ever liked has still stuck with me so I learned to embrace that and not close myself off to things."

"(When asked about his Westwood experiences) Westwood was a fantastic place to work, with great people, great games we created, and we all really loved what we did. We were passionate about it. I have so many great memories there, and the ironic thing is I actually regret not having attended more of the fun company functions and parties while I was instead playing club gigs with bands with the mentality of trying to get signed or discovered. Granted thats the kind of thing you try for when you're young, but it took awhile to sink in, that my real future and career was already under my nose. Lots of funny stuff happened. Office pranks, fun extra content we created, certain personalities that always made you laugh. Just all of life's experiences along the way whether it was staying in an awful hotel on a business trip, or trying to set-up an embarrassed co-worker with a date, it's all great stuff you can laugh about later. When Westwood closed it was truly the end of an era, but in a way it has been resurrected at Petroglyph where I am now. Half the company are old Westwood employees and although it's a different time in the industry, we are all thankful to still be working together and making the best games we can."

"(When asked about pop music) Pop music has become the largest farce in music history. It is soul-less, mechanical, and only made for the sole purpose of making the fastest dollar possible, with more emphasis on imagery than the music. I would much rather remain an independent recording artist who can dictate his own creativity and make it available to a smaller community of fans then sign with a major label under conditions of compromising my work just to sell lunch boxes and sound like every other thing out there. The only artists that have any longevity are the ones that pioneer a movement not follow a movement. The hundreds of following wannabes always get left in the dust or remain one-hit-wonders."

"(When asked about gaming) I have a few favorites: Stand-up arcade game - 720 degrees, RTS - Command & Conquer & Star Wars Empire at War, FPS - Unreal Tournament 2004. As far as RPGs, I prefer good old D&D on paper for that. The game industry is as strong as the music and film industry now, and crosses over into both as well. I still play all the games I just mentioned every now and again. I find it intriguing that retro-gaming has come back in a big way. All the old arcade games from the 80s seem to have found their way back in the form of built in joysticks that plug into TVs. Xbox360 has live arcade downloads, the Wii has classic Nintendo and Turbo Graphix downloads, it's very interesting. I think people are recognizing once again that simple short fun experiences are just as good as having long huge production experiences. Theres something out there for everyone, and gaming is as much for adults as it is for kids. I love variety in gaming. For a good while there was too much of the same types of games year after year, and it feels like we're seeing more creativity again, which is a good thing."

"(When asked to reflect on his career) Music is the emotion of the experience. Regarding whether someone knows composers by name, it comes down to how much the music had touched someone that they then care enough to find out who composed it. Myself as an example, I get a dozen or so fan emails every single day, from all over the globe. Most of the time it's new people that are just now figuring out who I am after all their years of playing games I've done, and that I composed some of their favorite game music or just their favorite game in particular. And it never gets old even though I've been reading them and answering them ever since I launched my website www.frankklepacki.com about seven years ago. You can't beat knowing you've had that kind of impact on people on a regular basis. I am always very grateful for it. Some of my fans cared enough to spread the word about my career that they made a full feature article on Wikipedia. That blew me away!"

"(Continued) The ironic thing is that my original goal in life was to be in a famous band, tour the world and sell millions of albums. Although that didn't quite happen, I got something else just as gratifying. Instead of being in a famous band, I gained some fame in the industry as a game composer. Instead of touring the world, I receive fan mail from around the world. Instead of selling millions of albums, my music is on millions of games! And I sell enough of my own albums that allows me to keep releasing them. So in a different way, I kind of got what I wanted after all. And I'm more than happy with that. The most fulfilling part of it is that I feel I contributed something that mattered to a significant number of people, and more importantly, I got to be a part of projects that mattered a lot to my life personally, like Star Wars!"

"It's from a video game, idiot! (or possibly "It's from a video game idiot!")"

"It makes me laugh. The part I don't understand, the dude is trying to act like I went to his house and took it from his computer. I don't know him from a can of paint. I'm 15 years deep. That's how you attack a king? You attack moi? Come on, man. You got to come correct. You the laughing stock. People are like, "You can't be serious.""

"Sample and stole is two different things. Stole is like I walked in your house, watched you make it, stole your Pro Tools ... Sample is like you heard it somewhere, and you just sampled. Maybe you didn't know who it was by because it don't have the credits listed."

"What is this thing called love? This funny thing called love? Just who can solve this mystery? Why should it make a fool of me?"

"If you want to buy my wares Follow me and climb the stairs … Love for sale."

"There's an, oh such a hungry yearning burning inside of me."

"Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above. Don't fence me in. Let me ride through the wide open country that I love Don't fence me in Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees Send me off forever but I ask you please Don't fence me in"

"I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences Don't fence me in"

"What moments divine, what rapture serene."

"Some Argentines, without means, do it, People say, in Boston, even beans do it. Let's do it, let's fall in love."

"The chimpanzees in the zoos do it, Some courageous kangaroos do it Let's do it, let's fall in love. I'm sure giraffes on the sly do it, Even eagles as they fly do it, Let's do it, let's fall in love."

"In shallow shoals, English soles do it Goldfish in the privacy of bowls do it."

"Electric eels I might add do it, Though it shocks 'em I know..."

"The world admits bears in pits do it, Even Pekingeses at the Ritz do it, Let's do it, let's fall in love."

"If you want a future, darling, Why don't you get a past?"

"They say that spring Means just one thing To little lovebirds. We're not above birds, Let's misbehave."

"They say that bears Have love affairs And even camels, We're merely mammals Let's misbehave."

"I get no kick from champagne. Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all, So tell me why it should be true That I get a kick out of you?"

"Some get a kick from cocaine. I'm sure that if I took even one sniff That would bore me terrifically, too, Yet, I get a kick out of you."

"You're the smile On the Mona Lisa."

"In olden days a glimpse of stocking Was looked on as something shocking But now, Heaven knows, Anything goes."

"Good authors, too, who once knew better words Now only use four-letter words Writing prose — Anything goes."

"Too bad, I'm no poet, I happen to know it, But anyway Here's a roundelay I wrote last night about you..."

"You are my fav'rite star, My haven in heaven above, You are ev'rything I love."

"Sad times May follow your tracks, Bad times May bar you from Saks, Add times When Satan in slacks Breaks down your self control..."

"This rule I propose, Always have an ace in the hole. Always try to arrive at Having an ace some place private. Always have an ace in the hole."

"You're the pain in my — The hurricane in my — Supersensitive heart, dear. Still I love you, I know, And the reason is merely because You irritate me so!"

"Relax for a moment my Jerry Come out of your dark monastery While Venus is beaming above. Darling, let's talk about love."

"You'd be so nice to come home to You'd be so nice by the fire..."

"You'd be so nice, You'd be paradise To come home to and love."

"It must be fun to be you And play with love as you do To treat each new romance As merely one more dance Or just another book to glance through It must be fun to acquire Whatever heart you desire, And when you're bored with it To tear it in two, It must be fun to be you."

"Be a clown, be a clown, All the world loves a clown. Act the fool, play the calf, And you'll always have the last laugh."

"Wear the cap and the bells And you'll rate all the great swells. If you become a doctor, folks'll face you with dread. If you become a dentist, they'll be glad when you're dead. You get a bigger hand if you can stand on your head. Be a clown, be a clown, be a clown."

"Be the poor silly ass And you'll always travel first class. Give 'em quips, give 'em fun, And they'll pay to say you're A–1. If you become a farmer, you've the weather to buck. If become a gambler you'll be struck with your luck. But jack you'll never lack if you can quack like a duck. Be a clown, be a clown, be a clown."

"So kiss me Kate, Thou lovely loon, E'er we start on our honeymoon. Oh, kiss me, Kate, Darling devil divine, For now thou shall ever be mine."

"In a way no other songs of the period quite did, Porter's created a world. It was a between–the–wars realm of drop–dead chic and careless name–dropping insouciance. And it was a sexy place to be invited."

"The wit of his words depended on his ability to raise the audience immediately to his own level — and keep it there. The instant happiness that Porter gave his audience is the kind that becomes history."

"Yeah. Cole Porter, but he was taken."

"Oh I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee, I'm going to Louisiana, my true love for to see It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry The sun so hot I froze to death; Susanna, don't you cry. Oh, Susanna, don't you cry for me For I come from Alabama, With my banjo on my knee."

"Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay, Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away, Gone from the earth to a better land I know, I hear their gentle voices calling "Old Black Joe.""

"Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me, Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee; Sounds of the rude world heard in the day, Lull'd by the moonlight have all pass'd away."

"The head must bow, and the back will have to bend, Wherever the darkey may go; A few more days, and the trouble all will end, In the field where the sugar-canes grow. A few more days for to tote the weary load,— No matter, 't will never be light; A few more days till we totter on the road:— Then my old Kentucky home, good-night!"

"The day goes by like a shadow o’er the heart, With sorrow where all was delight; The time has come when the darkies have to part: Then my old Kentucky home, good night!"

"Sadly I roam, Still longing for de old plantation, And for de old folks at home."

"All up and down the whole creation, Sadly I roam, Still longing for the old plantation, And for the old folks at home."

"All the world is sad and dreary, Everywhere I roam."

"Today I would choose Stephen Foster as an underrated composer. His music has been played so often that it is easy to forget how powerful, poignant and uniquely American it is."

"In the dark, I like to read his mind But I'm frightened of the things I might find."

"When I tell him that Im falling in love Why does he say "Hush, hush, keep it down now. Voices carry"?"

"I try so hard not to get upset Because I know all the trouble Ill get Oh, he tells me tears are something to hide And something to fear And I try so hard to keep it inside So no one can hear."

"He wants me, but only part of the time. He wants me if he can keep me in line."

"I look in your eyes I realize what you've sold me is love in a vacuum. Love in a vacuum."

"Living on silence, Living by the book. You get it to a science Of living on one good look. So put out all the fires And blow away the smoke. I'm getting pretty tired Of living on hope."

"Coming up close Everything sounds like welcome home. Come home and oh, by the way, Don't you know that I could make a dream that's barely half-awake come true? I wanted to say — but anything I could have said I felt somehow that you already knew."

"There's always something that's smoldering somewhere I know it don't make a difference to you But oh! It sure made a difference to me You'll see me off in the distance, I hope At the other end At the other end of the telescope."

"I should've known It was coming down to this. I should've known You would betray me but without the kiss. I should've known The kind of set-up it is."

"I don't know how to break the news, but It's pretty clear you'll be asked to choose between What you lack and what you excuse In this tug of war You can't say that they didn't warn you Though you'd rather that they just ignore you Cause your devices are not working for you anymore What you want, you don't know You're with stupid now"

"Though you pay for the hands they're shaking The speeches and the mistakes they're making As they struggle with the undertaking Of simple thought What you want, you don't know You're with stupid now What you know, you don't want to know You're with stupid now."

"In our endeavor we are never seeing eye to eye; No guts to sever so forever may we wave goodbye. And you're always telling me that it's my turn to move, When I wonder what could make the needle jump the groove. I won't fall for the oldest trick in the book, So don't sit there and think you're off of the hook. By saying there is no use changing 'causeThat's just what you are. That's just what you are."

"Oh, for the sake of momentum I've allowed my fears to get larger than life. And it's brought me to my current agendum Whereupon I deny fulfillment has yet to arrive.And I know life is getting shorter, I can't bring myself to set the scene. Even when it's approaching torture, I've got my routine."

"Now that I've met you, Would you object to Never seeing each other again? 'Cause I can't afford to Climb aboard you. No one's got that much ego to spend.So don't work your stuff, Because I've got troubles enough. No, don't pick on me When one act of kindness could be Deathly, Deathly, Definitely."

"The sex you're trading up for What you hope is love Is just another thing that He'll be careless of. But though there are caveats galore, You've only got to love him more — And you do; You really do. Even when it's all too clear."

"You're sure There's a cure. And you have finally found it. You think One drink Will shrink you 'til you're underground And living down. But it's not going to stop. It's not going to stop. It's not going to stop 'Til you wise up."

"You look like a perfect fit For a girl in need of a tourniquet."

"You struck me dumb, Like radium Like Peter Pan, or Superman, You have come... to save me. Come on and save me... Why don't you save me? If you could save me, From the ranks of the freaks, Who suspect they could never love anyone, Except the freaks, Who suspect they could never love anyone, Except the freaks, Who could never love anyone."

"I can't do it, I can't conceive You're everything you're trying to make me believe 'Cause this show is too well designed Too well to be held with only me in mind And how, how am I different? How, how am I different?"

"I can't do it, and as for you Can you in good conscience even ask me to? 'Cause what do you care about the great divide As long as you come down on the winner's side?"

"They're all still on their honeymoon, Just read the dialogue balloon. Everyone loves you — Why should they not? And I'm the only one who knows That Disneyland's about to close. I don't suppose you'd give it a shot Knowing all that you've gotAre cigarettes and Red Vines. Just close your eyes, 'cause, baby — You never do know. And I'll be on the sidelines, With my hands tied, Watching the show."

"He's a serious mister Shake his hand and he'll twist your arm. With Monopoly money We'll be buying the funny farm. So I'll do flips, and get paid in chips From a diamond as big as the Ritz — Then I'm calling it quits."

"I'll tell you a secret I don't even know. Baby, there's something wrong with me Baby, there's something wrong with me Baby, there's something wrong with me That I can't see."

"Tell me why I feel so bad, honey Fighting left me plenty of money But didn't keep the promise of memory lapses Like a building that's been slated for blasting I'm the proof that nothing is lasting Counting to eleven as it collapses"

"You know it I know it Why don't you Just show it You got a lot of money but you can't afford the freeway"

"I thought my life would be different somehow I thought my life would be better by now But it's not, and I don't know where to turn"

"Little tornado You and the hurricane Close your eyes and go campaign Make it go faster Baby go faster Make it go twice the speed of you and me"

"When you’re a charmer people respond they can’t see the hidden agenda you got going on"

"When you’re a charmer the world applauds they don’t know that secretly charmers feel like they’re frauds When you’re a charmer you hate yourself a victim of sideshow hypnosis like everyone else."

"You lie so well I could never even tell what were facts in your artful rearranging But I came back for more and you laughed in my face and you rubbed it in cause I’m a Labrador and I run when the gun drops the dove again"

"When we first met I was glad to be your pet like a Lab I once had that we called Maisie but fetching sticks was the best I had for tricks you got bored you got mad then you got crazy"

"I could almost shed a tear but let’s shine in the time we have remaining you’re a tough old gal but a dog is just a pal and believe me, my dear, I’m not complaining"

"Everybody’s got their differences too bad here’s a circumstance in which the stakes are high everybody’s got their secrets out so sad go around the room and see who doesn’t cry Soon enough you’ll be free to write it off you don’t know enough to call a bluff and the one who does will never ever tell"

"Soon enough you can say we made it up just for fun I guess to make a mess cause what’s more fun than other people’s hell"

"You can tell By the laugh in the dark at the sound of the bell You can tell It's the nucleus burning inside of the cell…"

"Applause is a receipt, not a note of demand."

"The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides."

"I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed. Therefore I feel (rightly or wrongly) that unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a never-ending problem, it doesn't interest me too much."

"Children are given Mozart because of the small quantity of the notes; grown-ups avoid Mozart because of the great quality of the notes."

"I know two kinds of audience only – one coughing, and one not coughing."

"There are two things about Schnabel. I think he was certainly one of the most important influences of the twentieth century, pretty much on all music. But what was most striking was the level of inspiration every time his fingers touched the keyboard. It was a highly moving, almost kind of life-transformative experience. And one of the reasons was there was little caprice in his approach to music. ‘Because I feel it that way’ was never a sufficient reason to do something; that is arbitrary and it had no place in his lessons either. Everything that he did, he could point to the text, and the text - an urtext, an original text - was terribly important to him. His edition of the Beethoven sonatas is so instructive because his ideas and suggestions are in a different print than what Beethoven wrote; you can always distinguish between Beethoven and Schnabel. But that kind of dedication, that kind of musical integrity to the desires and instructions from the composer, gave it an authenticity that was irresistible, and that was combined with his level of inspiration. Very quickly, it became impossible to distinguish between Mozart and Schnabel, Beethoven and Schnabel, or Schubert and Schnabel; he became the musical personification of the composer, which is why it was so irresistible what he did."

"Schnabel himself was an extraordinary composer, and actually thought of himself more as a composer than as a pianist. He wrote absolutely rhapsodic music, and endless pieces. All of his pieces, I think, are 45 minutes long! (laughs) Nothing of the little tidbit variety for him…"

"The European boys have small ideas but they sure know how to dress 'em up."

"I frequently hear music in the heart of noise."

"My people are American, my time is today…music must repeat the thought and aspirations of the times."

"The composer does not sit around and wait for an inspiration to walk up and introduce itself…Making music is actually little else than a matter of invention aided and abetted by emotion. In composing we combine what we know of music with what we feel."

"Jazz I regard as an American folk music; not the only one, but a very powerful one which is probably in the blood and feeling of the American people more than any other style of folk music."

"Modern European composers ... have very largely received their stimulus, their rhythms and impulses from Machine Age America. They have a much older tradition of musical technique which has helped them put into musical terms a little more clearly the thoughts that originated here. They can express themselves more glibly."

"Not many composers have ideas. Far more of them know how to use strange instruments which do not require ideas."

"A skyscraper is at the same time a triumph of the machine and a tremendous emotional experience, almost breath-taking. Not merely its height but its mass and proportions are the result of an emotion, as well as of calculation."

"When jazz is played in another nation, it is called American. When it is played in another country, it sounds false. Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America."

"An entire composition written in jazz could not live."

"I like to think of music as an emotional science."

"While the doctors were sawing away at Ira's midriff, I submitted a variety of ideas to George. One of the most successful was the title of the best song in the show, "Someone to Watch Over Me." I wrote and was credited with two songs: "Oh, Kay" and "Heaven On Earth." I wrote the verse for the spiritual number "Clap Yo' Hands" and a lyric called "That Certain Something You've Got," but Ira changed the lyrics and called it "Oh, Kay, You're O.K. with Me." It was the title song of the show and the least distinguished. Ira made me a present of the credit for it. It was the opposite of plagiarism; we call it donorism. George, realizing that any sum he paid me would have to come out of Ira's royalties, paid me next to nothing. It was decided that I was to get 1¢ for every copy of sheet music that was sold. When Ira sent me my first paycheck it was for 96¢. Some time shortly thereafter, Ira wrote asking if I minded canceling the arrangement which involved a lot of bookkeeping for such small sums. I said no, I didn't mind. I was proud to work with the great Gershwin. I would've done it for nothing, which I did."

"There is no better way to spend an evening than listening to George Gershwin at the piano. Fortunately for his audience, he seldom was away from it. He played his own tunes to Ira's special lyrics and though his voice was pure gravel it was special entertainment."

"It certainly will be if you are still around."

"Tell me, George, if you had it to do all over, would you fall in love with yourself again?"

"It would have been better if you had died and Gershwin had written the elegy."

"When Sam Harris was preparing a Chicago company of Of Thee I Sing after it won the Pulitzer Prize, George, Ira, Harris and I were on the train to attend the opening. I thought it would be fun to ask Harris, with George sitting there, who his favorite composer was. Without hesitation Harris answered, "George Cohan," and began to sing Cohan songs and tell Cohan stories. George wasn't irritated at all, as anyone else might have been; he was just amused."

"He never raised his voice. When he asked for something, it was usually in an apologetic tone. I know he had this reputation for being brash, but that was just the way his music was. His death was a tragedy. When we were on tour, many times he would complain that he smelled garbage. Today, physicians will tell you that's a clue that you might have a brain tumor, but back then nobody knew. He often would be fighting depression, and when he went out on tour, it wasn't to make money. The whole point was to go out and get some quick adulation to boost himself up."

"Well, if I were thus rationed in this article and could have but one adjective for George Gershwin, that adjective would be "ingenuous." Ingenuous at and about his piano. Once an occasional composer named Oscar Levant stood beside that piano while those sure, sinewy, catlike Gershwin fingers beat their brilliant drum-fire—the tumultuous cascade of the "Rhapsody In Blue," the amorous languor of "The Man I Love," the impish glee of "Fascinating Rhythm," the fine, jaunty, dust-spurning scorn of "Strike Up the Band." If the performer was familiar with the work of any other composer, he gave no evidence of it. Levant (who, by the way, makes a fleeting appearance in the new Dashlell Hammett book, under the guise of Levi Oscant) could be heard mutterIng under his breath, "An evening with Gershwin Is a Gershwln evening." "I wonder," said our young composer dreamily, "if my music will be played a hundred years from now." "It certainly will be," said the bitter Levant,"if you are still around.""

"The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together – with a thin paste of flour and water… I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky…but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter."

"Gershwin's tragedy was not that he failed to cross the tracks, but rather that he did, and once there in his new habitat, was deprived of the chance to plunge his roots firmly into the new soil."

"If jazz should threaten to become a hampering stereotype, a "tradition" in its turn, George would go forward to the next fresh impulse that arose in him. You may call him the King of jazz and associate his name with the lifting of jazz into musical artistry. Very well, and his best thanks. But not on that account is he to be thrust into a pigeonhole. George Gershwin did not begin as a jazzer; he will not end as one."

"Gershwin's melodic gift was phenomenal. His songs contain the essence of New York in the 1920s and have deservedly become classics of their kind, part of the 20th-century folk-song tradition in the sense that they are popular music which has been spread by oral tradition (for many must have sung a Gershwin song without having any idea who wrote it)."

"[I]t's only good songs that last, not good rhythm, and in the first six years or so of his composing George was interested mainly in developing new rhythms."

"George died on July 11, 1937, but I don't have to believe that if I don't want to."

"Porgy is…an interesting example of what can be done by talent in spite of a bad setup. With a libretto that should never have been accepted on a subject that should never have been chosen, a man who should never have attempted it has written a work that has a considerable power."

"There's a place for us, Somewhere a place for us Peace and quiet and open air wait for us, Somewhere. There's a time for us, Some day a time for us Time together with time to spare, time to look, time to care, Someday. Somewhere we'll find a new way of living. We'll find a way of forgiving, Somewhere.'"

"I'm a lazy writer. My idea of heaven is not writing. On the other hand, I'm obviously compulsive about it."

"Plays also, but musicals particularly—the last collaborator is your audience. So you got to wait until the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration. And when the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written. And things that seem to work well, work in the sense of carry the story forward and be integral to the piece, suddenly become a little less relevant or a little less functional, or a little overlong, or a little overweight, or a little whatever. And so you start reshaping in front of an audience."

"Without question, Steve is the best Broadway lyricist, past or present."

"It became such a hit that it superseded anything that any band had ever had. It was the first time that a so-called swing band played something melodic and still gave it a beat."

"You run into a party and [a] woman comes up to you. She's the most beautiful creature you ever saw — Ava Gardner — and says, "I like you and why don't we get together?" What are you going to say, "No"? You'd have to be an idiot. She was an incredible creature."

"My job is to play music, not politics, and my only obligation is to the people who pay to listen to me. I don't attempt to ram hackneyed, insipid tunes down the public's throat just because they've been artificially hypoed to the so-called 'hit' class. This policy of trying to maintain some vestige of musical integrity has, naturally, earned me enemies, people who think I'm a longhair, impressed with my own ability. Nothing could be farther from the truth. My faith in dance music — I refuse to call it swing — borders on the fanatic. I have the utmost respect for the many real musicians who are creating a new music as important as the classics, but I have no respect for musical clowns who lead an orchestra with a baton and a quip. However, more power to them if they can make it pay."

"The vilest offender who truly believes, That moment from Jesus a pardon receives."

"“Give,” said the little stream, “Give, oh give, give, oh give,” As it hurried down the hill. “I am small, I know, but wherever I go The fields grow greener still.”"

"On! ye patriots to the battle. Hear Fort Moultrie's canon rattle. Then away, then away, then away to the fight! Go meet those Southern Traitors with iron will and should your courage falter boys, remember Bunker Hill. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! The stars and stripes forever! Hurrah! Hurrah! Our Union shall not sever! As our fathers crushed oppression deal with those who breathe Secession. Then away, then away, then away to the fight. Though Beauregard and Wigfall. Their swords may whet. Just tell them Major Anderson. Has not surrendered yet. Hurrah! Hurrah! Our Union shall not sever! Is Virginia, too, seceeding? Washington's remains unheeding? Then away, then away, then away to the fight. Unfold our country's banner. In triumph there and let the rebels desecrate that banner if they dare. Hurrah! Hurrah! Our Union shall not sever! Volunteers, be up and doing. Still the good old path pursuing. Then away, then away, then away to the fight. Your sires, who fought before you have led the way. Then follow in their footsteps and be as brave as they. Hurrah! Hurrah! Our Union shall not sever! On! ye patriots to the battle. Hear Fort Moultrie's cannon rattle then away, then away, then away to the fight. The star that lights our Union shall never set! Though fierce may be the conflict we'll gain the victory yet. Hurrah! Hurrah! Our Union shall not sever!"

"Pa was forced to be a hobo Because he played the oboe And the oboe it is clearly understood Is an ill wind that nobody blows good"

"And why do I sew each new chapeau With a style they most look positively grim in? Strictly between us, entre-nous I hate women."

"My purpose is to create music not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing. To attempt what old Chinese painters called 'spirit resonance' in melody and sound."

"I propose to create an heroic, monumental style of composition simple enough to inspire all people, completely free from fads, artificial mannerisms and false sophistications, direct, forceful, sincere, always original but never unnatural. Music must be freed from decadence and stagnation. There has been too much emphasis on small things while the great truths have been overlooked. The superficial must be dispensed with. Music must become virile to express big things. It is not my purpose to supply a few pseudo intellectual musicians and critics with more food for brilliant argumentation, but rather to inspire all mankind with new heroism and spiritual nobility. This may appear to be sentimental and impossible to some, but it must be remembered that Palestrina, Handel, and Beethoven would not consider it either sentimental or impossible. In fact, the worthiest creative art has been motivated consciously or unconsciously by the desire for the regeneration of mankind."

"The greater the emotional intensity, the greater the simplicity."

"We are in a very dangerous period. We are in danger of destroying ourselves, and I have a great fear about this…The older generation is ruling ruthlessly. I feel that this is a terrible threat to our civilization. It's the greed of huge companies and huge organizations which control life in a kind of a brutal way…It's gotten worse and worse, somehow, because physical science has given us more and more terrible deadly weapons, and the human spirit has been destroyed in so many cases, so what's the use of having the most powerful country in the world if we have killed the soul. It's of no use."

"I love you, A bushel and a peck, A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck. Hug around the neck and a barrel and a heap, Barrel and a heap and I'm talking in my sleep."

"I'd love to get you on a slow boat to China, All to myself, alone. Get you and keep you in my arms evermore, Leave all your lovers weeping on the far away shore."

"Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition And we'll all stay free. Praise the Lord and swing into position Can't afford to sit around a-wishin' Praise the Lord, we're all between perdition And the deep blue sea."

"I've got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle, As I go riding merrily along. And they sing, "Oh, ain't you glad you're single?" And that song ain't so very far from wrong."

"The producer orders a certain title. The musical director orders a certain rhythm. The dance director orders a certain number of bars. And the composer orders a certain number... of aspirin. [on working in Hollywood]"

"No, they've got no time for glory in the Infantry. No, they've got no use for praises loudly sung, But in every soldier's heart in all the Infantry Shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young."

"On the island of New Georgia in the Solomons, Stands a simple wooden cross alone to tell That beneath the silent coral of the Solomons, Sleeps a man, sleeps a man remembered well."

"On a lone barren isle, where the wild roaring billows Assail the stern rock, and the loud tempests rave, The hero lies still, while the dew-drooping willows, Like fond weeping mourners, lean over his grave. The lightnings may flash and the loud thunders rattle; He heeds not, he hears not, he's free from all pain; He sleeps his last sleep, he has fought his last battle; No sound can awake him to glory again!"

"Yet spirit immortal, the tomb can not bind thee, But like thine own eagle that soars to the sun Thou springest from bondage and leavest behind thee A name which before thee no mortal hath won. Tho' nations may combat, and war's thunders rattle, No more on thy steed wilt thou sweep o’er the plain: Thou sleep'st thy last sleep, thou hast fought thy last battle, No sound can awake thee to glory again."

"Oft did I wonder why the setting sun Should look upon us with a blushing face: Is't not for shame of what he hath seen done, Whilst in our hemisphere he ran his race?"

"I know this from somewhere—it seems as though every time I turn on the radio this seems to slip in; and I've always liked it. It's cute, real cute; and although it's sort of not in my department and I don't know too much about that type of music, I like it an awful lot. Wonderful piano; vibes sound like what's his name, [[w:Terry Gibbs|[Terry] Gibbs]], a little bit; and the alto, if it's not the Bird, he loves Bird. All the solos were wonderful. I've got to give it four stars."

"Contrary to several conflicting stories, I got the name "Count" right in Kansas City in 1936 while at the Reno Club. I was known as Bill Basie at that time. One night, while we were broadcasting, the announcer called me to the microphone for those usual few words of introduction. He commented that Bill Basie was a rather ordinary name, and further that there were a couple of well-known bandleaders named Earl Hines and Duke Ellington. Then he said, "Bill, I think I'll call you Count Basie from now on. Is that all right with you?" I thought he was kidding, shrugged my shoulders and replied, "OK." Well that was the last time I was ever introduced as Bill Basie. From then on, it was Count Basie, and I never did lose that nickname. It's funny the way those things will stick."

"It's the way you play that makes it. What I say is, for Christ's sake, you don't have to kill yourself to sing. Play like you play. Play like you think, and then you got it, if you're going to get it. And whatever you get, that's you, so that's your story."

"Count Basie’s name brings to mind associations that might seem contradictory: a famously minimalist piano style and the celebrated big band he led for 50 years. In fact, the two were perfect complements. The Basie band took much of its character from the subtle way the Count’s pithy, elliptical attack framed his shouting brass and saxes. More crucially, Basie’s touch set the tone for the band’s rhythm section; the light, insistent pulse that generated the irresistible current of swing that lifted soloists and ensemble to heights of inspired excitement."

"The Basie band took much of its character from the subtle way the Count’s pithy, elliptical attack framed his shouting brass and saxophones. More crucially, Basie’s touch set the tone for the band’s rhythm section; the light, insistent pulse that generated the irresistible current of swing that lifted soloists and ensemble to heights of inspired excitement."

"We've only just begun to live, White lace and promises A kiss for luck and we're on our way."

"Before the rising sun we fly, So many roads to choose We start out walking and learn to run."

"Sharing horizons that are new to us, Watching the signs along the way, Talking it over just the two of us, Working together day to day Together."

"So much of life ahead We'll find a place where there's room to grow, And yes, we've just begun."

"Why are there so many songs about rainbows And what's on the other side? Rainbows are visions, but only illusions, And rainbows have nothing to hide. So we've been told and some choose to believe it I know they're wrong, wait and see. Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection, The lovers, the dreamers and me."

"Our love is an old love, baby. It's older than all our years. I have seen in strange young eyes Familiar tears."

"We're old souls in a new life baby. They gave us a new life To live and learn."

"Our paths have crossed and parted, This love affair was started Long, long ago. This love survives the ages In its story lives are pages Fill them up, may ours turn slow."

"Our love is a strong love, baby. We give it all And still receive."

"All souls last forever So we need never fear goodbye."

"In time, we kiss — hello!"

"The best part of being a songwriter — beyond being able to make a living at it — is what I call the "heart payment" of a song. That's when somebody comes up after a concert and says, "My mom was a single mom, and 'You And Me Against The World' was a really important song to us." Or "We got married to 'We've Only Just Begun'" or 'Evergreen.' Or "'I Won't Last A Day Without You' got me through some hard times.'" That's heart payment for a songwriter."

"I think the trick for any songwriter is authenticity. For the young songwriter coming up who is connected to his generation, as I was connected to mine, write honestly about what's going on in the center of your life. You know, when "We've Only Just Begun" was a Number 1 record, I think the Number 1 album in the country was "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." So it was as far away from what was happening in the music scene as you can get. And yet it was a hit. I think it was a hit because of, obviously, Karen's amazing vocal, but I think that any time we write authentically and honestly about what's going on in the center of our chest, because people are so much alike, there's a big a chance that it's going on in the center of your chest, too."

"Relating to the specifics of relationships, and writing love songs, I tapped into something that seemed to work for my generation. I love the fact that some of the songs continue to survive, but I think that there's a window of opportunity for a time when you really, really relate to your generation. And I think a lot of us pass through that as songwriters."

"'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there 's no place like home; A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there, Which sought through the world is ne'er met with elsewhere."

"An exile from home splendour dazzles in vain, Oh give me my lowly thatched cottage again; The birds singing gayly, that came at my call, Give me them, and that peace of mind dearer than all."

"Dartmouth is the place I’ve devoted my life to, so it’s very sad to see this kind of decline in the intellectual strength of the institution."

"Nowadays, all students have access to and indeed most own computers and are comfortable with the software used to compose music. There are probably too many musical options for them now and the trick is to limit the number of musical ideas so as to develop structure and continuity in their work."

"The pressure to give A grades is intense. It comes from the students and increasingly from their parents as well."

"If you think this was an isolated incident, let me paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemoller, "First they came for the music faculty and I did not speak out because I was not a musician. Then they came for the psychologists and I did not speak out because I was not a psychologist. Then they came for the biologists and I did not speak out because I was not a biologist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.""

"I am what I am I am my own special creation So come take a look Give me the hook or the ovation It's my world that I want to have a little pride in My world and it's not a place I have to hide in Life's not worth a damn till you can say Hey world I am what I am."

"Salutations my niggas, I'm aware that I'm different, you can still keep it hood while you're smoking just listen, it don't matter your race just take a blunt to the face"

"Blood sweat and tears homie I'm made of it"

"I never gave a fuck, I never gave a fuck what niggas thought about me. I mean, I did, but like fuck it. You know what I'm sayin'?"

"I know it's easy to imagine but its easier to just "do" If you can't "do" what you imagine then what is imagination to you?"

"Cause day and night, the lonely stoner seems to free his mind at night, he's all alone through the day and night, the lonely loner seems to free his mind at night"

"And if I die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take but please don't cry, just know that I have made these songs for you, and if I die before I wake I pray the lord my soul to take cause I'm ready for a funeral"

"This is my story, this is my song If you feel it, muthafucka, you can't go wrong to the screw-face niggaz, whatch you on? Get off that, get a goal and focus dawg"

"For even in hell, I still have faith to one day be free with my father at the gates but make no mistakes, I'll show you what time takes to be a success on earth, mixed with all the hate"

"I've got some issues that nobody can see and all of these emotions are pouring out of me I bring them to the light for you it's only right"

"if I fall if I die know I lived it to the fullest, if I fall if I die know I lived and missed some bullets"

"you don't really care about the trials of tomorrow, rather lay awake in a bed full of sorrow"

"You can’t, can’t be, where I,I be Follow me and you’ll see and you’ll see."

"No I'm not no loser, I'll see you in Hell."

"Can't we just all get a bong and tag along."

"Birds seen flying around, you never see them too long on the ground, You want to be one of them..."

"I hope they understand that I really understand That they don't understand"

"I know what it feels like to have a broken nose. And ain't nobody hit you in it. It's really cause that shit that you snorted and put all in it. That time you thought I was finished no I just experimented and it helped me adjust and be ok, with being demented"

"Green Acres is the place to be; Farm living is the life for me."

"There were three sisters, three little sisters, And each one was only in her teens, And one loved a soldier, and one loved a sailor, And one loved a man from the marines."

"And those three sisters, three little sisters, They stayed home and read their magazines, And you can tell it to the army, tell it to the navy, And tell it to the marines."

"They're creepy and they're kooky, Mysterious and spooky, They're all together ooky, The Addams Family."

"Temporal was the first recording that captured my true guitar sound (dinosaurs slipping and blocks of wire whittled with a feather). The mood of the world was different and yet music (sculpted time) always is there waiting to be manifested."

"I love Bach, I listened to him for 25 years, all my life, so I never get tired of Bach. And to learn Bach and play it is such a joy, even if no one ever hears it, just to play it sitting alone at home it makes you feel good, it's like a form of meditation. You can play it over and over and never get tired of it, it's a miracle. Bach I think is the greatest of all western musicians. Probably most people come to that conclusion. (laughs)"

"A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future."

"The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together — with a thin paste of flour and water… I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky… but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter."

"Any great work of art … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world — the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air."

"The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's impossible; you just don't meet everyone in the world."

"To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation."

"Callas? She was pure electricity."

"Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?"

"The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama. Act one: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act two: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act three: Greed and hypocrisy … I don't dare continue."

"Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence.""

"Bernstein has been disclosing musical secrets that have been well known for over 400 years."

"Today, he uses music as an accompaniment to his conducting."

"It was hard not to pay attention to Lenny, who made sure that was always the case by always being fascinating."

""Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the Jubilee! Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!" So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea, While we were marching through Georgia."

"It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born, And was always his treasure and pride; But it stopp'd short never to go again When the old man died."

"Father, dear father, come home with me now! The clock in the steeple strikes three; The house is so lonely, the hours are so long For poor weeping mother and me. Yes, we are alone, poor Benny is dead, And gone with the angels of light; And these were the very last words that he said, "I want to kiss Papa good night.""

"I feel that music is the art which can best express the emotions which flow within us. It conveys something bigger than it is."

"I'm starting to realize that touring really involves a lot of waiting around doing nothing."

"A song is not just a collection of melodic riffs, it is an emotional statement."

"One of the most common failings [when writing a drum track] is repetition. Nobody wants to hear that same stupid 16-line bass-snare pattern throughout the WHOLE song. Didn't your mother ever teach you that variety is the spice of life?"

"There's a big difference between playing shows for fun, and playing shows because you're in desperate need of the money."

"I think as a musician you really have to have a wide variety of tastes, or else you will unconsciously get into a rut."

"If anything I probably gravitate to things with great melodies/harmonies, and interesting/syncopated beats."

"Some people are like "Oh, I hate guitars." How can you hate a guitar? It makes no sense. It's just an instrument."

"I find a lot of club music extremely boring."

"One of the issues these days is the sheer amount of music out there to be listened to. There are more bands than one could ever hope to explore."

"Ideally, a song should contain both elements of high melodic tension, and low melodic tension. No listener wants to sit through a totally high-energy 180 BPM non-stop 6-minute ride through synth mania unless they are already busy grooving madly on some dance floor in a smoky club somewhere. Also, unless your listener is on heavy sedation, he or she will not enjoy your sparse 18-minute ambient tune which consists of the same languid piano riff repeated over and over again."

"Silicon approaches certain fundamental limits; organic bliss is the soul catcher."

"Once you have a basic grasp of the theories underlying music, you can pretty much pick up any instrument you want."

"I've been fascinated with arcane chord progressions since I was young. The trick is to keep them interesting, while still in the realm of 'normality' (otherwise the listener has no context to appreciate the progressions in)."

"Well anyone can make a 'weird' [chord] progression by randomly picking triads."

"As with any collaboration, you have to find someone that's in your 'mode' of making music."

"Usually musicians have egos and personality quirks which makes it difficult to form collaborative efforts (for long periods of time, anyways)."

"I'm not a big fan of asynchronicity just for its own sake - a lot of people push rhythmic variation so far that the basic pulse of the music gets lost (and the listener is confused)."

"Unfortunately, as technology has improved, that which was 'underground' now heads towards obsolescence."

"I think that the public judges a song on the overall feel, not individual samples. If a sample contributes too heavily to the song, and the sample is recognized, the opinion of the piece goes down."

"It's hard to quantify a 'top ten' list of songs for many reasons. I like many styles of music, and it's difficult to compare radically divergent types of music with each other."

"If I was obsessed with making money off of my music, I wouldn't have released it for free on the internet for the last 5 years."

"I'm much more into 'electronica' (yeah, I know it's cliche these days)."

"A lot of [my] songs have various strange oddities in them - usually this is the result of late-night dementia."

"Sometimes if you polish too much, you rub off the shine."

"Every musician, I guess, wants to alter the world to his or her taste in some fashion... That's part of why I write music."

"I try to avoid categorizing music as much as I can, though. Everyone steals so much from everyone else these days, the lines between genres are very washed-out."

"Stylistic evolution comes from listening to what other people have done and making a Darwinistic modification."

"I'd like to see people try to sample the sound less and try to sample the style a bit more. Some people see this sort of 'copying' as offensive... I'm inclined to think the opposite - all music is built on imitation and expansion."

"Unfortunately Sting's jazz work isn't nearly as inventive as his rock songs."

"I think we'll soon see a new breed of musicians who have both a modern chordal sense (jazz) and a high comfort level with synthesizers and new breeds of sounds (from the electronica/techno/dj scene)."

"Music is nothing but ratios and harmonic math, anyways."

"A lot of my tracked music was written when I was very young, relatively speaking. I was very optimistic, I had finally discovered some sort of public musical outlet, it was generally a very happy time. So, the music of that time sort of reflects that, I think? By the time I started the Alpha Conspiracy project, I was older, a bit more sophisticated (and, well, cynical), and so the music got more complex."

"We started out in the middle ages creating music which had certain desirable physical properties (for example, a major chord sounds "nice" because the frequencies are in integer ratios to each other). And then as society evolved, we created these emotional contexts for certain instruments and progressions. Major-chord arpeggios sound "happy", minor chords sound "sad", chromatic scales can sound "scary", et cetera. In the 20th century, film soundtracks reinforced this point as people associated certain kinds of music with certain visual and emotional experiences. It's a giant feedback loop, really; once you grow up in a given culture, it leaves this musical fingerprint on you which colors your experiences."

"To impact someone emotionally, [a musical piece] has to contain "interesting" melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic content, and what defines "interesting" is up to the listener."

"You could argue that there's maybe some mathematical interest in a Bach fugue, say, but the only thing that music does really well is "move" people -- make them feel something."

"So, if you played a C major chord to pretty much any person on the planet, they'd say that it sounds "harmonious" (or pleasing, or happy, etc, etc). But now when you want to put chords and melodies in an ordering and make a larger piece called a "song", then that is a much more difficult process, and gets very subjective. At that point, it's not just the chords, it's the lyrics, rhythms, instrumentation, tempo, intensity, any number of other things that goes into a song... so many variables that it's almost impossible to predict how a song will affect a given person."

"Certainly there are songs out there that are massively popular, and you can use some reverse analysis to see how they're put together, but it's difficult to reliably engineer a "hit". Add to this the constantly swirling winds of cultural taste, and you can see that the music industry is more akin to playing the lottery than anything else. Having some talent or taste can give you a bit of an edge, but it's still a huge roulette wheel.."

"Well, when music "moves" someone, it doesn't necessarily have to be in a positive direction. Some people certainly get moved by darker music, and there are all sorts of emotions which music can create that are interesting -- aggression, foreboding, anger, fear. Not everyone wants to feel happy all the time :)"

"If someone only ever listens to, say, Nickelback, their opinion [about music taste] is valid but largely meaningless since they don't bring any depth to the discussion :)"

"I think there are some objective [musical] qualities... how complex something is, how melodic, how diverse the tonality is, et cetera. But I could also make a piece of music that contains all of those and yet isn't "good" from a subjective viewpoint. For example, take Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", Beatles "Yesterday", and Underworld's "Born Slippy", and play them all on top of each other at the same time. Great music in their own right, but terrible sounding together."

"Imagine presenting a Nirvana or BT track to someone from the 1850's, they would probably see it as noise and not much else. Society as a whole has a much more nuanced and wide view of what music can be now. It still usually contains various rhythmic, melodic, and vocal components, but they can be combined in so many interesting ways now."

"The usual problem with progressive rock is that the band can get so wrapped up in their own fantasy land that their music becomes completely inaccessible. "Wanky", if you will."

"I have a love for cheesy music. I don't want to list any bands and embarrass myself ;D"

"I think [Britney Spears] is a perfect example of an artificial construct -- someone with a decent voice and a very marketable image, that producers and business people turned into a pop star. Unfortunately, I think it took a toll on her, mentally, and I feel bad for the trouble that success has brought onto her. However, her music is pretty disposable, and she doesn't have the intelligence and cultural impact of someone like, say, Madonna."

"The problem these days is again just the sheer amount of music available, and that music isn't as important an experience in people's lives in the 21st century as it was previously."

"If someone gave me a million dollars to run a music label, I would focus on creating a specific artistic point of view, and creating some channel to build a fanbase. Warp Records was a great example of a label that had a particular style, and many people would buy records just because the artists were associated with the label."

"I love philosophy. It's fascinating to try to discover how perception, or experience, or memory works. I've always been a diehard relativist at heart, and I find it very interesting to read other people's philosophical ideas and how they see the world through their particular lens."

"I think much of the conflict in the world is directly the result of people's varying interpretations of reality, or perhaps you could term it the "distortions" in their lenses. The best one can do is to try to consume as much knowledge as possible, both from your experiences, and from the words of others, in order to try to form a complete picture of the world."

"A human is a complicated organic/electrical system, which is immersed in a culture. Try raising a monkey like a human, it won't work, you need the human's certain brain characteristics (including self-reflection) in order to create a truly intelligent creature. The brain processes inputs and perception in very particular ways, and I think until we understand the underlying processes better, there is no way to really simulate it in software. Computers will continue to be good at simplistic analysis, and raw processing power, but the subtlety of emotions is something intrinsic to the human organism and culture."

"Religion is a simplistic answer that society has created in order to make people feel better, but there is little evidence as to its validity. There are thousands of religions in the world, each with their own "correct" answers, and each contradicting each other. For now the most sensible explanation to me is that we are the result of a lucky combination of cosmic factors, we're the "mold" that has grown on this particular planet and in a universe as vast as ours, it's expected that somewhere this would happen."

"There may not be a high-level purpose for humanity, but that doesn't mean we can't find inspiration in the world. I think there is a combination of psychological and environmental factors that combine to create various urges in humanity -- most importantly the urge to create, to contribute something to the world, to express your personal worldview and see how the world responds. Art doesn't happen in a vacuum, and if it were only for personal gain then nobody would ever release music to the public. The process changes you, and also changes the world itself, creating ripples of inspiration which flow between the artist and the listener."

"Somewhere there's a happy harbor far from the storm. Out where the sun shines there is someone I'm meant to adore, and I know the day I find her, I'll smile once more."

"I knew I was doing things different but at the same time I was doing things that were very natural for me … I wasn’t trying to break any rules. But I wrote the way I heard things."

"Look a-here, sweet mama, let's burn off both our shoes Well, my heart's a-beatin' rhythm and my soul is singin' the blues."

"There have been many great performers, but only four great stylists—Al Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and Jerry Lee Lewis."

"I never set fire to a piano. I'd like to have got away with it, though. I pushed a couple of them in the river. They wasn't any good."

"If I couldn't do it my way, I'd best stay at home."

"I never said I was the greatest. I’m the best."

"Love when you can Cry when you have to... Be who you must That's a part of the plan Await your arrival With simple survival And one day we'll all understand... Your conscience awakes and you see your mistakes And you wish someone would buy your confession The days miss their mark and the night gets so dark"

"Dusty day dawning Three hours late Open the curtains And let the rest wait My mind goes running Three thousand miles east I may miss the harvest But I won't miss the feast... And it looks like you're gonna Have to see me again... Cause I've got a woman Who waits for me there And I need a breath of that Sweet country air"

"Changing horses in the middle of a stream Gets you wet and sometimes cold"

"I can see you in the distance And you're heading for a fall Sinking deeper by the minute You're about to lose it all... You better change Before the sun goes down You better leave Before you are the last in town You better raise Your fortresses or tear them down... Tear them down!"

"As the Raven Flies Lyrics I see the raven's made Her nest in your eyes She's got you thinking that Her love is a prize And you'll go under from The weight of her lies"

"Now the wind is still In a moment it will be raging Now my soul is young In a moment it will be aging And high above the pines I wrote several lines And left them in a bottle For you to find"

"Someone's been telling you stories Someone's been telling you stories And they just ain't true No, they just ain't true They just ain't true Someone's been telling you stories]]."

"There's a place in the world For a gambler There's a burden that only he can bear... And he sees. Oh, yes he sees... There's a light in the depths Of your darkness There's a calm at the eye Of every storm There's a light in the depths Of your [[blindness|darkness}} Let it shine Oh, let it shine"

"Gonna pull in the shutters on this heart of mine Roll up the carpets and pull in the blinds And retreat to the chambers that I left behind In hopes there still may be love left to find Still may be love left to find."

"Longer than there've been fishes in the ocean Higher than any bird ever flew. Longer than there've been stars up in the heavens, I've been in love with you."

"Along the road your steps may stumble Your thoughts may start to stray But through it all a heart held humble Levels and lights your way."

"And it's run for the roses As fast as you can Your fate is delivered Your moment's at hand It's the chance of a lifetime In a lifetime of chance And it's high time you joined In the dance It's high time you joined In the dance."

"An only child alone and wild A cabinet maker's son. His hands were meant for different work And his heart was known to none -- He left his home and went his lone and solitary way And he gave to me a gift I know I never can repay."

"The leader of the band is tired And his eyes are growing old But his blood runs through my instrument And his song is in my soul -- My life has been a poor attempt To imitate the man. I'm just a living legacy To the leader of the band."

"We drank a toast to innocence We drank a toast to now. And tried to reach beyond the emptiness But neither one knew how."

"The beer was empty and our tongues were tired And running out of things to say. She gave a kiss to me as I got out And I watched her drive away.Just for a moment I was back at school And felt that old familiar pain And as I turned to make my way back home The snow turned into rain."

"She says no When she means yes And what she wants You know that I can't guess. When we want more You know we ask for less Such is the language of love..."

"Too many hearts have been broken Failing to trust what they feel. But trust isn't something that's spoken And love's never wrong when it's real."

"Looking back now toward the start You said you thought I'd lost my path And I asked if you still considered love an art And you said "No, I think it's more a craft" And I just turned and laughed I just had to turn and laugh."

"Venturing further than the length of your sight Out past the reach of your beginnings There is a gamble in each proud act of flight But the losses pale before the winnings Circling and diving with this freedom you’ve found Illusion blows apart and scatters There is no darkness in this place that we're bound Love is the only thing that matters"

"Doctrine is the frame-work of life; it is the skeleton of truth, to be clothed and rounded out by the living graces of a holy life. It is only the lean creature whose bones become offensive."

"A mightier love for the Son of God, to overpower and subdue and lead captive these wayward and truant affections of the natural heart — this is what is needed."

"Sorrow is only one of the lower notes in the oratorio of our blessedness."

"You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed."

"Collaboration is being open to each other's ideas and benefiting from each other's perspectives in an open way. Collaboration is all about rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and helping each other to constantly improve a piece. And, it's also about spurring each other on to doing great, hard work — it's easier to do it in a collaboration than on your own."

"Having a tradition is a great thing to work within, and maybe today [it] is the only way to land musically dramatic work."

"First of all I'd like to thank my collaborator Howard Ashman who encouraged me to take the opportunity to compose my first film score with "The Little Mermaid." Thank you for your support, Howard. I'd like to thank all the people at Disney: Jeffrey Katzenberg, Roy Disney, Peter Schneider and Maureen Donley. Our outstanding directors: John Musker, Ron Clements. And thanks to a great music department: my orchestrator Thomas Pasatieri, conductor J.A.C. ["Jack"] Redford, music editor Kathy Bennett, recording engineer John Richards, supervisors Chris Montan and Andy Hill. Special thanks to my manager Scott Shukat and my wife Janis. And Academy members, thank you."

"(Howard Ashman:I won't do fish jokes, just say a couple thank yous. At Disney to Jeff Katzenberg, Peter Schneider. To Sam Wright, who sang the song, all the words. Mostly though to John Musker and Ron Clements whose movie "Little Mermaid" really is. At William Morris there's Don Aslan, Mike Peretzian and my beloved Esther Sherman. And at home there's my mom, there's my sister, there's Nancy, and Bill. I feel really lucky. Thank you.) Thanks to the musical team that worked on the songs: Robby Merkin, Thomas Pasatieri, and J.A.C. ["Jack"] Redford in particular. Thank you. And thank you to the Academy."

"On behalf of all the composers I want to thank Debbie Allen for that [referring to the production number]. That was just great. I'd like to thank the members of the Academy, in particular the members of the Music Branch, for this honor. At Disney I want to thank Jeffrey Katzenberg, Roy Disney, Peter Schneider, our producer Don Hahn, our directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, and our brilliant animators. And I can't say enough about my music team. My orchestrator Danny Troob, conductor David Friedman, recording engineers John Richards, Michael Farrow, Bruce Botnick. Many thanks to the Disney music department, Chris Montan, Andy Hill. My music editor Kathy Bennett. My love and thanks to Janis, Anna and Nora. My mom and dad. My manager Scott Shukat. And most of all, I thank my late partner and friend, Howard Ashman. Howard, I wish you could have seen the finished product. I wish you could have heard the completed score. I know you would have been proud. Thank you."

"On behalf of Howard, I know if he were here he would want to thank Angela Lansbury for her incomparable performance of the song in the movie as "Mrs. Potts," and also Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson for their performance. Also thanks to Walter A. and Robbie Buchanan for their work on the single. And accepting for Howard will be Bill Lauch. (Bill Lauch: Thanks, Alan. Howard and I shared a home and a life together and I'm very happy and very proud to accept this for him. But it is bittersweet. This is the first Academy Award given to someone we've lost to AIDS. In working on "Beauty and the Beast" Howard faced incredible personal challenges but always gave his best. And what made that possible was an atmosphere of understanding, love and support. That's something everyone facing AIDS not only needs, but deserves. There's an inscription at Howard's grave in Baltimore. It reads, "O, that he had one more song to sing." We'll never hear that song, but I'm deeply grateful for this tribute you've given to what he left behind. For Howard, I thank you.)"

"(Tim Rice: Thank you very much. I'd like to thank everybody in the Academy who voted for me, especially Alan. And I'd like to pay tribute to two great lyricists. One, of course, is Howard Ashman. I'm extremely lucky to be standing in his shoes. I know he'd be here today if he were still alive. And the other is the great Sammy Cahn, who is my inspiration for many years. And it's great to be working with Alan, and my thanks to everybody at Disney.) A couple of thanks. Thanks to Lea Salonga and Brad Kane, and thanks to Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle. And of course Walter Afanasieff and Robert Buchanan, for creating a beautiful record. And thank you, Chris Montan, for never giving up on this song. Thank you."

"I've been very fortunate to work with a studio like Disney that really values music. And that attitude starts at the top, and I want to thank Jeffrey Katzenberg and Roy Disney and Michael Eisner for making my work possible. "Aladdin" was a major transition for me from my longtime collaborator and friend Howard Ashman to a new role and new songwriting partner in Tim Rice. As always I was blessed with great support from my music team: Danny Troob and David Friedman, from Chris Montan and Andy Hill, Bruce Botnick, Michael Farrow and Kathy Bennett. From Peter Schneider, John Musker, Ron Clements, Amy Pell and Don Ernst. I owe a debt of thanks to all of them and to the brilliant animators, musicians, singers and actors who made "Aladdin" so spectacular and magical. Scott Shukat, my family, my wife Janis, and Anna and Nora, my love and thanks. And to the members of the Academy, thank you very, very much."

"Well, a lot of time and effort and collaboration went into the score of "Pocahontas." I have a lot of people to thank and not a lot of time to thank them. So I want to thank my music team. My orchestrator Danny Troob, synth[?] arranger Martin Erskine, my music editor Kathy Bennett, engineer John Richards. My thanks to Chris Montan, Tod Cooper, our directors Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, our producers, Jim Pentecost, my Disney family past and present. Time doesn't permit me to say all their names but I particularly want to thank Peter Schneider and Tom Schumacher and all the brilliant singers, musicians and technicians whose talents made "Pocahontas" sing. And thank you, Academy members."

"Well, thank you, Vanessa Williams, and thank you, Judy Kuhn, for your wonderful performances of the song, and Robbie Buchanan for a wonderful production of the single -- for arrangement of the single and Keith Sonnet for production. Stephen... (Stephen Schwartz: We want to express our appreciation to members of the Academy. Our deep gratitude to our colleagues at Disney, past and present. And I want to acknowledge my personal debt to the Native American poets and wisdom keepers who inspired my work on this project, most particularly in the case of this song, Chief Seattle. Thank you very much.)"

"It seems to me I've heard that song before. It's from an old familiar score. I know it well, that melody."

"Till you're walking beside me, I'll walk alone."

"I fall in love too easily I fall in love too fast I fall in love too terribly hard For love to ever last My heart should be well-schooled Cause I've been fooled in the past But still I fall in love so easily I fall in love too fast"

"Three coins in a fountain Each one seeking happiness Thrown by three hopeful lovers Which one will the fountain bless?"

"When somebody loves you It's no good unless he loves you - all the way Happy to be near you When you need someone to cheer you - all the way."

"Just what makes that little old ant Think he’ll move that rubber tree plant? Anyone knows an ant, can’t Move a rubber tree plant. But he’s got high hopes, he’s got high hopes He’s got high apple pie, in the sky hopes."

"Call me irresponsible Yes, I'm unreliable But it's undeniably true That I'm irresponsibly mad for you."

"We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people. Information is alienated experience. Information is not something that exists. Indeed, computers don't really exist, exactly; they're only subject to human interpretation. This is a strong primary humanism I am promoting. As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful."

"I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology."

"The quest to rationally prove the possibility of sentience in a computer (or perhaps in the Internet) is the modern version of proving God's existence. ...eventually a cybernetically minded twenty-first century version of Kant will appear in order to present a tedious "proof" that such adventures are futile."

"People are demonstrably insane when it comes to assessing human sentience."

"There has been over a decade of work worldwide in Darwinian approaches to generating software, and... nothing has arisen from the work that would make software in general any better."

"If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources."

"Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics."

"Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow."

"The problem is that in every example we know, a layer that can change fast also can't change very much."

"The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates."

"There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility."

"The greatest crime of Marxism wasn't simply that much of what it claimed was false but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality."

"There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory."

"Digital information is really just people in disguise."

"Jingle bells, Jingle bells, Jingle all the way; Oh! what joy it is to ride In a one horse open sleigh."

"If of these United States I was the President, No man that owed another should ever pay a cent; And he who dunn'd another should be banished far away, And attention to the pretty girls is all a man should pay."

"One thing I learned a long time ago was my fretboard, in terms of all the scales in all the positions...You have to learn it - there are no two ways about it. I shift between positions so easily now that I really don't have to think about them much...I would suggest starting your scale education with the major and minor scales, and after that, diminished, augmented and whole-tone. Then depending on what kind of music you want to play, the modes should be learned. My theory about this kind of thing is that you should learn it all. Once you've learned it you can play whatever you want to play, and I think that your playing will be more advanced, and you'll have a better understanding of the instrument."

"I'm constantly thinking melodies. Now, to add interest to those melodies, obviously you have to know what things can be superimposed over a chord, and I will think of extended arpeggios and the upper estensions. If I'm playing very vertically, I will invariably start to include certaing passing notes which imply certain scales -- like a melodic minor scale against a C minor chord, or diminished scales, something like that. But I'm not thinking of a scale at that specific moment. I'm thinking of the notes as surrounding that chord -- because I know how each of the twelve notes in music sound against a C minor seventh, for instance."

"Music will always be young."

"If you don't have ability, you wind up playing in a rock band."

"[N]ow keep your fuckin' mouth shut or I'll show you what it's like!"

"Then see what kind of a band you got up there, without all the assistance."

"You're not my kind of people, at all."

"If there is one jazz drummer who can truly claim to have influenced a tsunami of rock’n’roll musicians, it’s Buddy Rich. Despite surfacing from the golden age of jazz, the New York City-born drummer’s awe-inspiring solos predicted a future in which time-keepers ventured beyond the backbeat with improvisatory fills and ultra-busy drum patterns. The beauty of Rich’s playing is that he made drums the star of the show without ripping up the rhythmic roots of his brass section. Officially the only drummer to beat Animal on The Muppet Show (yes, seriously!), Rich’s sheer power and showmanship inspired the likes of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, Queen’s Roger Taylor and Black Sabbath’s Bill Ward, all of whom tried to emulate their hero’s mix of uncompromising ferocity and jazz-influenced professionalism. Easily one of the best drummers of any era, Buddy Rich was a legend in his own time."

"He was one of the greatest drummer to ever play the instrument. He had the probably the greatest hands ever, and played with fire and tenacity unmatched by none. Could have played double bass if he wanted, and there are pictures, but he didn't need it, he was that good! And no one f*cked with him on the bandstand!"

"I saw Buddy play live (and stood about 20 feet from him every time) about three or four times when I was very young. It was always utterly jaw dropping. I still watch and listen to him on a regular basis. His presence on the drums and his command of the instrument was second to none. I’ve always referred to him as “the Rolls Royce of drumming.""

"How blessed are they who are born deaf, and are spared the agony of listening to the hideous sounds of Symphony No. 3 by Roy Harris, just performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Roy Harris should have stuck to truck driving instead of insulting music-lovers with his senseless noise."

"The relationship of feminism to my work and the evolution of the form of my music are in violent flux."

"Regarding my childhood, my grandmother could play by ear and she loved to hear me practice and would say after every piece, "That was pretty. Play that one again." She was a booster. I had two women piano teachers who encouraged me to compose--Margie Murphy and Helen Lipscomb. Helen was also a composer and we used part of my lessons for composition. When I was in high school, I read John Cage's books and fell in love with the ideas and the excitement of the avant garde. My music, as a result, moved over to what has been called post-Cagian, non-academic. That lasted until about 1979 at which point I changed. My music is now quite lyrical, sometimes called neo-Romantic, and full of cut-ups/collage of newly composed materials. Since 1985 I have been composing mostly swales for various instrumental combinations. A swale is a meadow or a marsh where there is nourishment and moisture and therefore, a rich diversity of plant life. My work, since 1984, has been made from swatches (of newly composed music, rather than found music) which are reminiscent of this diversity..."

"My own mystic bent leads me to believe that musical variations, collage, reiteration and process, or evolution, are beautiful. Life is worth living and beauty is worth making."

"To make something beautiful is revolutionary (not low class, not easy, not a sign of low intelligence)."

"The idea that beauty is revolution is a revelation to me. I once believed that the concept of the music was more important than the sound, that the politics of the notation was more important than the time limits of the rehersals and therefore, more important than the sound of the performance"

"I've rediscovered the part of my brain that can't decode anything, that can't add, that can't work from a verbalized concept, that doesn't care about stylish notation, that makes melodies that have pitch and rhythm, that doesn't know anything about zen eternity and gets bored and changes, that isn't worried about being commercial or avant-garde or serial or any other little category. Beauty is enough."

"Beauty means perfect to me, but it also has an additional meaning having to do with being pleasurable, rather than painful. Beauty is hard to make. The making is painful, and involves a certain amount of craft, and a relaxation of the part of the brain that says, "Don't write that. X wrote those four notes in 1542 or 1979 or 1825 or whatever period you are worried about being influenced by.""

"Real music soars above class society."

"I used to be obsessed with this idea that odd numbers are masculine and even ones are feminine. So I wrote pieces that used even numbers, as in:"

"::1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9"

"::a b c d e f g h i"

"::j k l m n o p q r"

"::s t u v w x y z"

"I have never been able to understand women composers who do not wish to be called women composers. I understand their argument but it seems so superficial to me. Our strength lies in our identification with women and music."

"To be simply a poorly paid or seldom played composer seems so tragic to me. But to be a woman composer with all the trials and tribulations that seem to go along with being a woman composer, puts everything in perspective. The struggle becomes heroic--not pitiful. The success becomes a success for all of us in the cause, not something merely egoistic."

"At the start of the twenty-first century, composer Beth Anderson is one of the most exciting personalities on the American classical music scene, bucking trends of formalism and attempting to make touch with her inner self, tastes and identity in her music."

"Beth Anderson writes pretty music - the prettiest music I know of, after Schubert, Faure, Debussy, and a few long-dead white males. Her prettiness is not an intellectual deficiency, but a political stance. "To make something beautiful," Anderson likes to say, "is revolutionary." Her web page lists her as a "neo-romantic, avant-garde composer," and she may be the only composer in the world who could justify both contradictory labels. Her music has the simplicity of that of Erik Satie or, even more, Virgil Thomson. It is listenable, melodic, fun to play. Such qualities often bring her into conflict with other composers. On one 12-tone-heavy musical festival, she says, after her lullaby was performed "everyone quit speaking to me." And yet her music is no throwback to an easy past, but radical on its own terms."

"By the early 1980s, however, Anderson had moved away from text-sound music and conceptualism toward a chamber music style of great beauty, generally simple tonality, and luminous textures. She adopted a deceptively unmilitant motto—“To make something beautiful is revolutionary”... Even today, however, her chamber music betrays its twentieth-century roots in its pervasive use of collage. Her preferred form, and one she invented herself, is the swale: a term for a meadow or marsh in which a lot of plants grow together, and by extension a musical piece in which diverse musical ideas and even styles grow side by side. (The interest is curiously anticipated in a 1979 text-sound piece that runs, “Clover and daisies, alfalfa, and Queen Anne’s lace, hegemony, hodge-podge, and heliotrope... ” However, Anderson didn’t discover the word until a horse named Swale won the 1984 Kentucky Derby.)"

"Well, if you take a roll of film and instead of making pictures on it, you process it by pickling it in vinegar and putting it in a jar and presenting it for people to look at that way, projected through the lens of the fluid around it, this is so distorted and such a monstrous disfigurement of the normal way in which you are 'supposed to use' film, that it is a kind of pathology; it’s a sickness in the sense of a virus being inserted in the system. I think wellness and change are measured by comparison to potential for extremes of illness or death. I was trying to kill film. I wanted to let it lay over and die."

"Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down."

"Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid."

"That’s who I am. I don’t look much like him now with my foot wrapped up and all that kind of business."

"Boy, when I'm dead twenty-five years, people are going to begin to recognize me."

"Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music, and to shy bricks at "hateful ragtime" no longer passes for musical culture."

"What is scurrilously called ragtime is an invention that is here to stay. That is now conceded by all classes of musicians."

"Never play ragtime fast at any time."

"Panic in Wall Street, brokers feeling melancholy."

"Good times coming. Good times have come."

"Listening to the strains of genuine negro ragtime, brokers forget their cares."

"As friends and as musical collaborators we had traveled, toured and written — together and apart — the events of our lives as if they were songs, and I guess they were. When news of Jacques’ death came I stayed locked in my bedroom and drank for a week. That kind of self pity was something he wouldn’t have approved of, but all I could do was replay our songs (our children) and ruminate over our unfinished life together."

"Jean, Jean, roses are red All the leaves have gone green And the clouds are so low You can touch them, and so Come out to the meadow, Jean."

"Jean, Jean, you're young and alive Come out of your half-dreamed dream And run, if you will, to the top of the hill Open your arms, bonnie Jean."

"Till the sheep in the valley come home my way Till the stars fall around me and find me alone When the sun comes a-singin' I'll still be waitin' For Jean, Jean, roses are red And all of the leaves have gone green While the hills are ablaze with the moon's yellow haze Come into my arms, bonnie Jean."

"Adieu, Francoise, my trusted wife; Without you I'd have had a lonely life. You cheated lots of times but then, I forgave you in the end Though your lover was my friend.Adieu, Francoise, it's hard to die When all the birds are singing in the sky. Now that spring is in the air With your lovers ev'rywhere, Just be careful; I'll be there."

"We have only love, to offer as a prayer, for all the wrongs in the world. So... like singing troubadours we’ll go, singing love wherever we go."

"We have only love, to help us find our way, as we go out into the world. So... like laughing children we’ll go singing love wherever we go."

"If we only have love Then tomorrow will dawn And the days of our years Will rise on that morn."

"If we only have love We can reach those in pain We can heal all our wounds We can use our own names."

"If we only have love We can melt all the guns And then give the new world To our daughters and sons.If we only have love Then Jerusalem stands And then death has no shadow There are no foreign lands."

"If we only have love We will never bow down We'll be tall as the pines Neither heroes nor clowns. If we only have love Then we'll only be men And we'll drink from the Grail To be born once again Then with nothing at all But the little we are We'll have conquered all time All space, the sun, and the stars."

"He asked her, "please stop quoting Rod McKuen in your postcards""

"The bestselling poet of 1968 was Rod McKuen, who penned rhythmic little bon mots that he read in a raspy voice suggestive either of emotion or bronchitis. A Hollywood songwriter, clean-shaven with V-neck sweaters, McKuen was a long way from the beats. But by early 1968 he had already sold 250,000 volumes of his unabashedly sentimental verse. His two books, Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows and Listen to the Warm, were selling more than any book on The New York Times fiction bestseller list, although they were not listed, because poetry was not included on bestseller lists. With characteristic self-effacing candor, he said in a 1968 interview, “I’m not a poet; I’m a stringer of words.” When he came down with hepatitis, fans by the hundreds sent him stuffed animals. To many, he and his fans seemed unbearable."

"The frustration was with the philosophy of the instrument."

"When it broke down, I would break down. I had to wean myself from it just to survive. I had to have interventions. People would say, ‘You’ve got to do something else.’ So that was part of it—being too dependent on this thing I couldn’t count on."

"It had to go all the way out to the west coast and come all the way back to the east coast every time it needed to be fixed."

"And if it made it one trip, it wouldn’t make the other. Then somebody stole half of it. I found out about that 20 years later, when someone sent me a photograph and said, ‘Does this look familiar to you?’ I nearly fainted."

"Now my ears are awakening again, just because I’m part of the zeitgeist of contemporary whatever. Even though I’m in this remote place, I get it."

"Leon Kirschner, I think, is an extraordinary composer. Absolutely beautiful, beautiful music."

"Thank you for videotaping "Dharma & Greg" and freeze-framing on my vanity card. I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you some of my personal beliefs. I believe that everyone thinks they can write. This is not true. It is true, however, that everyone can direct. I believe that the Laws of Karma do not apply to show business, where good things happen to bad people on a fairly regular basis. I believe that what doesn't kill us makes us bitter. I believe that the obsessive worship of movie, TV and sports figures is less likely to produce spiritual gain than praying to Thor. I believe that Larry was a vastly underrated Stooge, without whom Moe and Curly could not conform to the comedy law of three (thanks, Lee). I believe my kids are secretly proud of me. I believe that if you can't find anything nice to say about people whom you've helped to make wildly successful and then they stabbed you in the back, then don't say anything at all. I believe I have a great dog, maybe the greatest dog in the whole wide world, yes, he is! I believe that beer is a gateway drug that leads, inevitably, to vodka and somebody oughta do something about it. I believe that when ABC reads this, I'm gonna be in biiiig trouble. I believe that Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High", is the greatest rock song ever recorded. Once again, thanks for watching "Dharma & Greg". Please be sure to tune in again to this vanity card for more of my personal beliefs."

"Once again, thank you for video-taping "Dharma & Greg" and freeze-framing on my vanity card. I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you some more of my beliefs. I believe that the guy who invented those speed bumps in the freeway that snap you back into consciousness when you're drifting into a nearby semi should be given a big hug. I believe that there are actually several cures for the summertime blues. I believe that in my earlier statement of beliefs, I erroneously believed that beer was a gateway drug that led to vodka. After intensive consultation with ABC executives, I now believe I was very, very wrong. Beer is good. Especially beer brewed by major manufacturers, and enjoyed in a responsible fashion. I believe I've spent my life expecting people to behave in a certain way. I believe that when they didn't behave according to my expectations, I became angry, sad, confused and occasionally fearful. I believe these expectations are the reason I've been angry, sad, confused and occasionally fearful more than I care to admit. As a result, I now believe my expectations are the real problem. I believe that everyone has this very same problem, and they ought to start acting accordingly. Well, that's all for now. I hope you continue to watch "Dharma & Greg" and check in on my vanity card for more of my personal beliefs."

"Once again, thanks for video-taping "Dharma & Greg," and freeze-framing on my vanity card. The following are a few more of my beliefs: I believe that El Niño is an international conspiracy perpetrated by evil roofing contractors. I believe it's high time The Beatles came clean on that whole "Paul is dead" thing. I believe that anyone who can read and speak clearly can be a network news anchorperson -- but not necessarily a weatherman. I believe that if I rid myself of insatiable cravings, lusts, paranoia, deep-seated anger and ill-will towards others, I'll be a much better person. I believe that TV is the cause of all the violence and immorality in our society -- ha! just kidding. I believe there's no business like show business, although if you're over-paid for feeding a big, scary monster, then that might be sort of like it. That's all for now, gotta go make a TV show. Once again, thanks for watching and keep checking for more of my beliefs real soon!"

"I believe I'm growing skeptical of cynicism."

"I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that if you've read this far in my vanity plate you are an extraordinary person infused with great love and compassion. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. (thanks, Jeff) I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy. I believe that all work and no play makes Chuck a dull boy."

"Well, once again I'd like to thank you for not only watching, but videotaping "Dharma & Greg." I know you're busy, so this shows a wonderful commitment on your part and I want you to acknowledge that commitment with a big ol' Chuck Lorre vanity card hug. Okay, with that done let's get on with why you're here, to learn more of my personal beliefs. I believe that this episode, which on the surface deals with a funny Valentine's adventure, in fact grapples with the weighty issue of Weltschmerz. Weltschmerz is a German word which loosely means "world suffering deriving from the inevitability of reality to never match up with our expectations." Boy, only the Germans could come up with a word like that. Anyway, in this episode Greg is in Weltschmerz hell as he discovers that life is never quite like the brochure. Dharma, on the other hand, recognizes that life is a flowing river and happiness exists only when one embraces its ever-changing nature. From this dilemma we draw the comedic essence of our story. Finally, I believe that when I retire and teach sitcom writing at a community college, I'll use this theme for one of my classes to impress the kids."

"Once again, thank you for videotaping "Dharma & Greg" and freeze-framing on my vanity card. For those of you who are new, this is my sporadic attempt to share my personal beliefs with millions of people (hence the term "vanity"). This attempt has led me into communicating many deep thoughts, and, I'm afraid to say, quite a few shallow ones as well. But what I've found most interesting is that after a few weeks, I've discovered myself scrounging for new beliefs. Things about which I could stand up and say with pride, "I believe in this, dammit!" Now that's not to say that I couldn't fill the card with a lot of mindless aphorisms. But do I waste my precious moment in the sun by proclaiming, "I believe that sex with multiple partners in a moving vehicle isn't all it's cracked up to be?" No, I do not. Do I squander this priceless opportunity to announce, "I believe we are better than the animals because we're capable of reading in the bathroom?" Once again, I do not. And so it is for this reason, I have no beliefs to share with you this week. No wait... actually I do believe that JFK had a much better understanding of the word "perks"."

"No need to freeze frame this one!"

"United we stand."

"My lawyer ate my vanity card."

"I got nothin'."

"You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. You broke that poor girl's heart. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. You should've told the truth right from the start. But my intentions were good. I was no slave to my wood. I wanted her to love me for me. He does have lots of riches, which attracts a lot of bitches. Thank you, Alan, but you'll never be on "Glee." Aw, crap. If I may throw in my two cents, your love was based on a pretense. Your relationship with mother is to blame. You didn't suckle on her boobies, you self-medicate with doobies, which explains why you used a made-up name. Cue da refrain. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. Everything you said was a lie. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. But you're still a really, really handsome guy. Thank you. Then what am I to do? So I don't always live with you. Wow, that hurts my feelings, but since I live there beneath your ceilings, I'll bite the pillow like the prison bitches do. Oooh! If she gives me one more chance, we can have a real romance. If she doesn't, we can party in my pants. 'Scuse me, no disrespect, but I have to interject, what makes you think you can steal the show? 'Cause I'm gay! Oh, you're so clearly from L.A. Yeah, I'm gay. And he will always be that way. I'm gay. Or as his Jersey friends would say: A-yo, badda bing, he's a big ol' 'mo. 'Scuse me, but we seem to be digressing, and I find it to be quite distressing. Can we sing about the problem that's at hand? Can Kate get over Sam and love who I am? You confuse me for someone who gives a damn. So bottom line, you're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. And I'll die sad and alone. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. (Ring!) Hold it, everybody, that's my phone. Hello? Kate? You're a douche. (Click!) Douche, douche, douche, douche, douche-y, douche, douche, douche. Douche, douche, douche, douche, douche-y, douche, douche, oooh, you're a douche... you're a dou- You couldn't say it meaner. I'm a big vagina cleaner. Didn't do what I oughta. I'm vinegar and water. On this we all agree. Oh yes, we all agree. Oh good, you finally see, to shining sea. Gimme a D-O-U-C-H-E, douche! Gimme a D-O-U-C-H-E, douche! Gimme a D-O-U-C-H-E, douche! Drum roll... You're a douche, you're a douche, just a big, fizzy douche. And that's all I'll ever be. You're a douche, you're a douche, you're a big, fizzy douche. And that's all you'll ever be. Douche!"

"Still got nothin'."

"In no particular order, I could not or would not exist without air, food, water, gravity, tides, the moon, the sun, night, civilization, the laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics, the law of the land, ancestors having sex, DNA, viruses, bacteria, plants, animals, oceans, ice caps, the kindness of strangers, the Big Bang, familial bonds, smart people, brave people, memory, medicine, the periodic table of elements, tribal instincts, magnetic fields, weather, Earth's molten core, a rotating Earth, a tilted Earth, tectonic plates, sleep, death, heat, consciousness, evolution, teachers and the miraculous, self-regulating chemical factory that is my body. Other than that, I like to think of myself as a self-made man."

"Gratitude."

"Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday, dear me. Happy birthday to me. (And 20 more would be nice)"

"Dear Alf, I'm your number one fan. I like you because you're an alien but you're funny, unlike my brother who's an alien but just a jerk. Anyway, I hope you're enjoying your time here on our planet and have found things to eat other than cats. I recommend chicken nuggets. Sincerely, Missy Cooper, age 10. P.S. My favorite color is pink. What's yours?"

"Connie Tucker is proud to announce that she is sweet on Dr. John Sturgis and they are officially a romantic couple."

"Scrabble fans might be troubled to see 3 Y tiles in tonight's episode. Fear not. The "Super Scrabble" version of the game actually comes with 4 Y tiles. Disaster averted."

"Congratulations Young Sheldon, for reaching 100 episodes!"

"The Writers Guild of America, of which I am a proud member, is on strike. While I'm pretty sure vanity cards are not covered under the pre-existing contract (I've certainly never been paid to write them), I still feel uncomfortable writing during a period of labor unrest (truth be told, I feel uncomfortable writing during a period of labor rest). Now that I think about it, I'm also uncomfortable with the word "labor". While I've put in very long hours over the years (70 hour weeks were not unusual), I've mostly been sitting on my ass, staring at a computer screen and wondering what comes next (maybe a writers strike should be called "ruminating unrest"). Regardless, I don't want to do anything that inadvertently helps the evil empire, so until a fair and equitable solution can be found, I'm going to walk around in a circle waving a stick with a sign. An activity that more closely resembles "labor"."

"Back in the days of network television, a vanity card in the end credits was a means by which writer-producers could express their creative dominion over the just-viewed show. It was dubbed a vanity card because vanity was all it had going for it. The actual producer of the show was the company that financed the show - that took the financial risk. The hierarchy was simple, the writer-producer couldn't fire the company, but the company could fire the writer-producer. I can vouch for this because I've been fired. A couple of times. But here we are now in the world of streaming television. On the plus side, a world where end credits are barely viewed by anyone. The viewer is actually encouraged to skip over them and quickly re-engage with another episode, or a different show or movie. Which brings me back to vanity cards. Why on Earth am I writing vanity cards for Bookie? My friends and family won't bother to read them. They might not even be able to find them. One might say, "If a vanity card is written on Max, and no one reads it, was it amusing?" Fuck if I know."

"Hi! It's been awhile. Haven't written a vanity card in what? Nine, ten months? There was a writers' strike. An actors' strike. A directors'... oh well, doesn't matter now. We're all friends. Colleagues. The folks who go to Sun Valley and the folks who go to San Fernando Valley are all on the same team. Thrilling audiences around the world. Making 'em laugh, making 'em cry. Making 'em wonder when this friggin' movie is gonna be over. I think I can speak for the thousands of people in show business I've never met, when I say we are very grateful to be back at work. Because it's only when we're working, do we have any sense of self-worth. But that might just be me."

"As I'm sure you know, network television has been undergoing seismic changes. Audiences have so many more choices than ever before, which I believe it's a good thing. The only difficulty is it's hard to measure what constitutes success. In the past, if you enjoyed tonight's premiere episode of Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage, I'd asked you to spread the word. Get some word of mouth going. That's no longer necessary. Now all I need is an algorithm, or bot, or some sort of silicon-based magical genie to secure the future of the show. Hey, Siri! Mm-hmm?"

"Heads up. I'm only writing this one card for Season 2 of Bookie. The reason is no one, not even my family and friends, bothers to read them. It's not surprising. Max actively dissuades viewers from reading end credits, let alone sticking around to read the mischievous word salad that is a classic Chuck Lorre vanity card. They want you, for their own selfish reasons, to immediately leap into the next episode or, failing that, MILF Manor. So once again, do not bother looking for a new card at the end of the remaining 7 episodes of Bookie. There won't be one. Will the world be a poorer place? I like to think so. If you're hungry for a peek inside my fiendishly clever mind. I still have a show with easily accessible vanity cards on CBS. Ask your grandma what that is and where it can be found."

"To the crew of LAFD Fire Truck 14, You saved my home. You made a snap decision to stop a rampaging fire that had already destroyed my neighbor's house. In doing so, you spared me incredible heartache. There are no words that can adequately express my gratitude. Maybe I can buy all you guys a nice dinner and you can watch a grown man cry tears of joy over his chicken parm, let me know."

"Getting the jump on David Ellison, Netflix, Apple, and Comcast, Chuck Lorre has offered to pay one million dollars in cash for Warner Bros. Discovery. To sweeten the pot, Mr. Lorre will include two weeks at a time-share condo in CABO (not Christmas), if WBD agrees to keep the Discovery channels."

"Working at Warner Bros. is like being raised by a single mom who keeps bringing home strange men!"

"I heard Edwin Fischer, who did not mean much to me. I heard another pianist in Berlin who had a big success and I thought he was awful — Mischa Levitzki. Just fingers, and you cannot listen only to fingers. There is a difference between artist and artisan. Levitzki was an artisan."

"His playing is stunning, with absolutely no smudging."

"His style on it was one of the phenomena of twentieth-century pianism. Above all he had tone: a magical tone, never hard even at moments of greatest stress; a shimmering, tinted, pellucid tone. His playing had a degree of spontaneity, of "lift," of dash, daring and subtle rhythm, that was unparalleled. Perhaps only his close friend Rachmaninoff was titan enough to stand by his side as an equal. But even Rachmaninoff never had Hofmann's poetry, color and vitality. Nobody so made the piano sing. When he played, there was the feeling of a tremendous and original musical personality. His rubato was carefully measured, yet it flowed freely and naturally. His playing always had breathing space, and his basses exceptional clarity. (Hofmann used to despise what he scornfully called "right-hand pianists.") Never did the playing sag, never were there dead spots, never did the tensile quality slacken. A strong classic element was represented in the purity of his pianistic approach. And his interpretations, romantic but not exaggerated, had a measure of classicism."

"Frank, you are, without doubt, a scarcity. Anyone who looks at the historical record of the juncture of art and technology finds you nearly unaccompanied when it comes to documenting this historical record between the years of the late-1960's up to the early 1990s. Basically there is you, Jack Burnham's book Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968), and Gene Youngblood's reference work Expanded Cinema (1970). Specifically, your books Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (1968), Art, Action and Participation (1975) and Art of the Electronic Age (1993) are indispensable research tools in helping us figure out how art got to where it is today - in your terms virtualized."

"The very idea of philosopher as art curator deeply interests me. One swiftly dreams of what Gilles Deleuze might have done with the opportunity to curate an art exhibition at MoMA: Art and Alloverness perhaps? Or Michel Foucault: the New Panopticons at the Centre Georges Pompidou? What would Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes have done at the International Center of Photography or at the Tate? What could Friedrich Nietzsche have done at the Louvre Museum? What indeed could Georges Bataille have haughtily done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art?"

"The digital revolution changed my process early on in terms of technique, but my early analog drawings and paintings had the same thematic intention as my latest digital work: the attempt to conjure, or render, a glimpse into an enigmatically layered and lively world that I sense and know to be reality, an energetic vibratory world of almost dreadful depth. In this respect, my process of making computer-robotic assisted paintings and animations have, until recently, been made up of an excessive concoction of ambiguous sexual body parts (morphed from both sexes) tied to the viral form. Philosophy has been, and is, a way of freeing myself enough to connect with this depth so as to process the phantasmagorical aspects of reality into art. This process of art making, for me, must hinge on a dynamic engagement and then wedding of image production and image resistance. The idea is to encourage subversive readings of computational media by presenting an artistic consciousness that articulates contemporary concerns regarding safety, truth, identity and objectivity."

"In the artist/theorist tradition of Robert Smithson, Joseph Nechvatal is a pioneer in the field of digital image making who challenges our perceptions of nature by altering conventional notions of space and time, gender, and self... Nechvatal successfully plunged into the depths where art, technology and theory meet."

"When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting, the tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly from your head."

"[My audiences] discover they are producing a tonal dimension of the music which interacts melodically, rhythmically, and spatially with the tones in the room. Tones ‘dance’ in the immediate space of their body, around them like a sonic wrap, cascade inside ears, and out to space in front of their eyes … Do not be alarmed! Your ears are not behaving strange or being damaged! … these virtual tones are a natural and very real physical aspect of auditory perception, similar to the fusing of two images resulting in a third three dimensional image in binocular perception... I want to release this music which is produced by the listener..."

"Many of Ms. Amacher’s most notable works are known only by reputation. They were site-specific installations that would be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to recreate, although several have been staged in new versions for different locations. Moreover, the handful of recordings that offer samples of her scores barely do them justice: Ms. Amacher was less concerned with sound on its own terms than with the way sound was perceived in space and over extended time periods."

"When I first heard the songs of Mario Ruiz Armengol I responded in awe at the totality of their musical expression. Mario's harmonic sense was one that I had never encountered in most Latin music; melodies which in themselves were distinctive and lingered in your mind after only one hearing; profound emotional content without being hyper-romantic in conception. Some of them seemed almost brooding in character, filled with a feeling of melancholia and reflecting the depth of his personality."

"First of all, this is Duke's band, and this is Tchaikovsky. Knowing things in their original sources, I abhor taking a concert thing and trying to treat it in a jazz light. In the beginning they have a very nice orchestral usage, but the minute they start going into Johnny Hodges and 4/4, it just doesn't fit. It comes out neither fowl nor fish. The orchestration is enjoyable because, for one reason, they've done a nice job of getting nice, legitimate, straight-sounding things. The melodies are very lovely, but, of course, Duke is the master in this type of thing. But over-all, from a jazz standpoint, I don't appreciate it at all. If I didn't know it was Tchaikovsky, for instance, with the tambourine bit and all, I would feel it was straight out of an MGM Arabian movie. The harmonies he used, particularly some of the background things, interested me more than the melodies, probably because the harmonic part of music interests me more than any. From an orchestrational standpoint I would give this somewhere around 3½ stars; but from a jazz standpoint, none."

"I have no idea who that is. It's a terrible performance, the band is horribly out of tune—is that Maynard Ferguson? It starts off at a dynamic peak and never deviates from it. It also starts out with what is supposed to be jazz musicians trying to play some sort of a Latin bag, which is not making it, because there's no solidity of rhythms. Latin rhythm sections being based on the constant contrast of instruments, and it never moves any place. And then that thing on the end—what's that supposed to be? An adaptation of Porgy and Bess of some sort? I guess it was some sort of an allusion toward Porgy and Bess. But then if it is, it's completely escaped all the rest of it. It's like giving a paragraph of reference out of a two-page article and then saying, Well, this is about this." That's one star for me."

"Of course that's Bud and Laurindo. I liked Laurindo very much, and I love some of the tunes he does. In fact, I've been doing some piano transcriptions of some guitar things of his, and we recently recorded a tune of his. This particular thing again—how are you going to equate it? As jazz? As Brazilian music or what? I would much rather hear Laurindo in his native habitat. I know he and Bud have been associated this way before, yet I don't feel that a real good rapport goes on between them. The constant mixing—half-jazz, half-Brazilian—I don't think it's good. You lose certain features of the one when you try to come out with the other. Let's give that three stars."

"That's five stars to start with. That's five stars to start with. That's Gil Evans, isn't it? The only thing that disturbed me about this—the whole thing, in its entirety, was tremendously satisfying: performance, orchestration is good, the harmonic usage is beautiful, the contrasting texture of orchestra, the whole thing is just great—but there are certain sections there when the background was so lovely it just seemed like the alto saxophone was out of place. Now this is the type of thing that just makes me smile. I enjoy every minute of it. I don't have to go for a "peak" and then think about something else while I'm listening. Gil Evans' writing, to me, is such a boon that when he came along with the Miles Ahead album, I was thankful, because since about the Stan Kenton Orchestra of 1952, where the writing had been very good, between Mulligan and Rugolo and the whole works, between those periods there had been a void, a retrogression back to the roots, and this took writing back to a standpoint which just wasn't interesting. So when Evans came along, I just flipped."

"I really don't know what to say about this without sounding hypercritical. First of all, the style of playing is so tremendously behind the beat, it gets to the point that I feel he's in opposition to his rhythm section, and I can't get a nice swing out of the thing. The pianist is tremendously heavy-handed, which I think gets in the way of what he's trying to do, so I feel that in some spots he's stumbling, instead of having the feeling that the man is executing what he wants to play. The whole thing strikes me as a sort of comme-ci-comme-ca performance of a like tune. Two stars."

"Now that to me is lovely music. Really, that type of thing really moves me. This, of course, is Bill Evans, Scott LaFaro, and Paul Motian.... Even Scott's playing on this particular album should disprove all the "naughty" things people said about him, about his being too active, getting in people's way; because the one thing about Scotty, with all his technique, was that he had a perceptivity, which let him use it judiciously. He started this record by playing on the first beat of every bar. He wasn't even playing in two, and any man who has that much technique, who knows where to limit himself, to me, is just great. And of course Bill plays lovely on the thing. That's another five-star."

"The subtlety of Brazilian rhythms comes from the type of instruments used. Afro-Cuban music has a scraper called the güiro which is played with a solid stick producing a loud scraping noise. This same instrument is paralleled in Braziliam music with the reco-reco, the difference being that the reco-reco is much smaller, less resonant, and played with something like a brush. The cabasa is a gourd wrapped in beads that is incapable of extremely loud noise. The same is true of the chocalho or cylinder, and the tambourine. A regular set of drums contrasts this. The result is a light rhythm that, unlike the conga, bongos and timbales of Afro-Cuban music, does not engulf the listener but permeates him. To this is usually added the guitar (unamplified) played finger-style, which completes the subtlety."

"I firmly believe that the more one is exposed to bossa nova, the less one is interested in how he can fit it to his jazz concept and the more he becomes interested in what his improvisation can do for bossa nova."

"My God, I heard this guy's albums for ages and finally to be able to look at him and see how he does it!""

"Johnny has never written a tune – at least none I've ever heard – that wasn't melodically and harmonically perfect."

"I'm gonna take a wild guess—I think that was Buddy DeFranco, and possibly the Glenn Miller Orchestra. The band strikes me as an enigma, in that, first of all, some interesting harmonic things are happening as far as the individual voicings are concerned, but yet it's played in an older, tighter fashion. For instance, the bass player, if there are chord changes happening every two beats, plays the root for two beats, then the next root for two beats—that type of sound. The harmony, especially in the opening part where the theme is established, is a lot more modern than that kind of band would normally sound. I think that they're playing that way to keep that Miller identity, with that rhythmic tightness"

"When I asked Sergio Mendes why he still called his group Brasil '66 in 1967, he said "'66 was a very good year!" That's his group and the French song from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It's not one of their better tracks. Some of the things they've done I have enjoyed tremendously, though it's getting to the point where he's had commercial success doing what he's doing, so it's now somewhere in between strong Brazilian music and quasi-rock. Joao Palma is an excellent drummer. Here they have John Pisano of the Tijuana Brass playing an amplified guitar. He is one of the few people who, on the regular amplified guitar, has really got the Brazilian thing down. He can play in the Baden Powell style, which is so compelling and so dynamic. Sergio is usually a much more melodic pianist, but here he's trying to give a hardness and vitality to the over-all commercial sound, and he comes out lacking what he usually has—his lines are usually very smoothly melodic. This has nothing to do with jazz, but I find it pleasant; on the other hand, some of the things they do, like O Pato [from Mendes' previous album], or some of the faster things, I enjoy much more. Two stars."

"That's wild! I'll start off with five stars and work backwards from there. Now there, to me, is the most perfect band in existence, whether you're thinking of it orchestrationally or in terms of Duke's immensely creative writing. I can't think of anybody I admire more than this man; nobody could even be compared with him, except Billy Strayhorn. Duke does something with this old, tired instrumentation of trumpets, trombones and saxophones, and he has a perfect way of utilizing the men's specific sounds. Anything he plays is a work of art. The band is out of tune, for instance, and it doesn't even matter. They almost have their own brand of intonation. Duke can take an exotic-sounding idea and create something – you might call it sophisticated crudity. It gives both the qualities that I look for – an earthy quality and the sophisticated quality."

"I had a chance to play that instrument for six days. Hearing German spoken around me made me think of my father, who died in 1960, and whom I hadn't thought much about in recent years. And I remembered what he meant to me. I played "Du, du liegst mir im Herzen" because my father used to sing it to me. So I sat there, thinking of my father, and weeping."

"Crassness of youth Concluding only half of the truth, Exuding only one small percent Of what I surely felt for you. And then one morning That brought a day so gently We set apart Things of the heart And lost love long ago."

"Bill and I were pretty much the same age bracket, and strangely enough, we both went through the same influences, starting with Nat Cole, going into Bud Powell during the bebop period, and then getting into the Lennie Tristano school orienta—in my particular case, Lee Konitz more than Lennie. I mean, in an era when everybody else was playing funky piano, we... I suppose, in a general category, that made us both the same. Whereby [sic] to my mind, we were both radically different. But after I put out that first album, the reviews started off by saying, "Clare Fischer owes much to Bill Evans." And then, when I would write an album, they would say "Clare Fischer owes much to Gil Evans." And I would call that my Evans brothers syndrome."

"My main orientation is harmonic. Bill, besides having the harmonic structures that he did, had a control of the dynamic level of the piano and pedaling, which is ridiculously fantastic. I never saw a man make so many gradations from pianissimo to piano in my life. I can't do that. On the other hand, I think that what I do harmonically is somewhere other than where he was."

"[M]ost of the pop music out today I consider to have become a homogenized product. It gets to the point that so much of what is going on is copying everything else that is out, because there is a businessman that knows what he has just sold millions of records with, and so he keeps trying to get every group that comes in to do it, you know. You know, you approach somebody who is well known as a booker or manager, and the first remark will be, "I love what you do, but you would have to change this to this, and that to that, and this to this, in order for me to be able to sell it." Well, by the time you've changed that, of course, it's like everything else that is out there. And when Prince first started sending me songs, I thought maybe that by the time I had done four arrangements that I would have started getting some sort of a repetitive something or other. I have been extremely surprised to find that each one is as different from the last as the next one is going to be different. Some of them are like little art songs. Some of them have dealt with heavy things like friendship and death. I mean, death of a friend. And yet, some of them are as baudy as..."

"Because of the limited keyboard. This is a very strange thing. When I play the piano, I get clear down to the left edge of the piano. Now, unlike Art Tatum, I don't take runs that go up, that always end up on the extreme high "C". But I really do like the low end. Even as an organist, it has bothered me that the keyboards are five octaves and stop at "C". I've always wished that my pedal board went down to "F". My harmonic thinking gets involved clear down to that "F" and to be cut off at the "C". I can't explain it. It's as if somebody were standing right next to you while you were playing and you just kept having the feeling like: "I can't go there; I can't go there." It does something to me. Whereby [sic] having the full keyboard just opens up a world of things to me."

"I'm about as Nordic and Germanic looking as they come. It doesn't matter whther I'm skinny or fat. I'm just that way. So, there have been dates: for instance, the date that I first met Alex Acuna, Luis Conte, Alfredo Rey, Sr., Alfredo Rey, Jr., Cachao, the Cuban bass player. I mean, all of these people. The night I met them, on a recording date, I was there with a bunch of Cubans and I walked in, and at first, before we recorded the music, they were all standing around, hanging out. And of course I wanted to join, so I went over and started joining in. Now my Spanish certainly is not street Spanish, it's book-learned Spanish. And Cubans speak a patois all their own, and I could tell, when I first was speaking there, you know, they kept saying, "Well, he's speaking our language, but he certainly doesn't sound like us; he's still an outsider. Maybe not as much an outsider as he was before." And yet, what really happens is that, by the time we start playing, then I felt like somebody gives my visa a stamp. You know, on the passport. Because at that point, suddenly I start getting smiles from people, and different things, and that's an experience which happens over and over and over."

"To me, there are two different types of musicians. Those who are display oriented and those who are content oriented, Bill Evans being a prime example of the content orientation. I am not interested in the displayers—guys who want to be playing a lot of notes to try to impress you that they got a lot of things that they can lay in there. I'm more interested in somebody picking something that has some really great feeling and laying it in, in a really good time concept. Jimmy Rowles is a perfectly good example of that. His choice of notes may not be uncommon, but boy where he lays them down is so individual that I will go for that every time. The same thing applies with composers. When you're a young composer and you first have a chance—and this goes with everybody—you write your most complex works when you're a young man. And then, as you get a little bit older, you find that you can lot simpler things [sic] and still enjoy the devil out of what you're doing."

"I've talked to him on the phone, received notes through the mail, but I've never seen him face to face. I sent him my last LP and I understand that he turned his head away as he took the disc out, saying, "I don't want to see what he looks like. I have this image and I don't want to destroy it." So there's a certain amount of mystery involved. I suppose if he knew I were a gray-haired, older guy with a big paunch, he might say, "Oh, that ruins it.""

"Playing that music delivered me from the pressures of my life. I played with my eyes closed and found that my backaches ceased and my headaches would go. The response to that rhythm was "My God, this makes me feel good." I never really remembered having that much fun with it before or thought about jazz making me feel good. But, at 46, it suddenly dawned on me that my body had priorities that my mind didn't allow, and I decided to (play Latin/jazz)✱ for myself and started having a helluva fine time."

"You don't ever get a chance to play what you really do; and if you do, you notice that you can't play, because you haven't been. And often I'd be asked to play like somebody else, like Joe Sample. I'd say, "I can't play like him. He's an original." I'd be asked to try and the producers would love it, but I'd feel rotten. Then one time I ran into Joe and he told me, "Man, I'm tired of people asking me to play like you." My jaw dropped. Then I found out this is a common practice."

"They disenfranchised me. It's like giving an award to Woody Herman's sax section, but not Woody, for "Early Autumn.""

"I relate to everything. I'm not just jazz, Latin or classical. I really am a fusion of all of those; not today's fusion, but my fusion."

"I'm two people. One is a teddy bear who is soft and cuddly. And the other is this guy who says, "Don't push me.""

"I pointed to the side of the road and then I pulled over and parked. When the guy got out of the car he was stripped to the waist. A typical young macho stud. He put his face within two inches of mine, and he was telling me what I was and what he was going to do to me. So I did the natural thing. I reached in and got a headlock on him, and I had him very firmly while he thrashed around. I felt I was doing just fine because I had stopped what was going on, but his girlfriend decided that he wasn't doing very well. So she ran and jumped on us. They both fell on top of me and my head crashed into the pavement. I landed on my left ear, got a hairline fracture and concussion. [...] It was like some kind of nether world. Most of the time I didn't know where I was. Like I'd wake up and find I.V. units in my arm, and I'd rip 'em out and say, "What kind of a hotel is this? You tell them I'm never coming here again." [...] When I came home from the hospital I was having terrible nightmares every night, sometimes to the point where I started not wanting to go to sleep. And I still have occasional migraines, dry eyes and short-term memory loss. [...] If I discovered anything in that strange, 10-month period of recovery, it's that music is the one thing that makes me sane."

"It's funny. People come to my house because I was recommended to them to do some writing. They've never heard of me, and you can see the reticence written all over their faces. Then they look at the walls and see the platinum and gold albums and they say, "Oh. That one's from Prince! That's from Robert Palmer! Oh my God, Paul McCartney!" And then they say, "You're a really fine composer"--without having heard any of my music."

"In 1992 by chance I witnessed a drum and bugle corps competition on television and became aware of three-valve bugles. A year later my wife, Donna, and I attended a performance in La Mirada of the previous year's winner. I have experienced fine concert band performances and also good symphonies in my life, but what was not prepared for what I experienced that day. The entire bugle corps was turned away from us playing softly and suddenly they turned toward us and projected a very thick chord. Every hair on my body stood up (and I have a lot of it) and I decided at that moment to buy some of these instruments. In the next year I purchased approximately $14,000 worth of bugles. After having completed an orchestrational family all the way down to the contrabass bugle, I began writing. This album is the result of this particular interest in my sixth decade in music."

"Since suffering a concussion eight years ago, I find my inside emotions are right to the front and as such, when I heard that Antonio Carlos Jobim had died in December of 1994 I was much affected, I experienced happenings like no other time in my life. While sleeping one night, I dreamed that I was conducting a recording session with strings in Brazil and we were performing Jobim's "Corcovado," except that besides thje melody and harmony, there was polyharmonic bass line. As I awakened from this dream, I went to my piano and wrote down what I had dreamed."

"Sometime 30 years ago I wrote a piece for the Stan Kenton Neophonic Band. The night of the concert at the Music Center Auditorium in Los Angeles Stan counted it off much too fast. When it came to the recapitulation at the end, the woodwind instrumentation had changed to mixtures of piccolos, flutes and saxes; and being too fast, it turned into a woodwind knuckle-buster. I was hiding on the floor between the seats. Later, when this was recorded, Stan counted too slowly. That recording was released without my piece. Years later when Stan created his "The Creative World of Stan Kenton" record company, Capitol was so angry that he had left them and released everything they had in the can to jeopardize his market. My piece was released with the first third cut off. I rewrote this for my present instrumentation and when we first went through it, while conducting, I was in tears to finally hear what I had written 30 years ago."

"As a teenager I had already arranged pieces for the school band in exchange for music lessons. I also played cello, clarinet, and some other instruments regularly. Thanks to that experience, as an arranger I was able to understand the specific sound and tuning of an instrument and to work intuitively."

"Nepotism. My brother’s son, André Fischer, was the drummer in the band Rufus, with Chaka Khan. Apparently, the arrangements I made for their early records were appreciated, so in the following years I was hired almost exclusively by black artists. I am surprised that my arrangements are now considered one of the prerequisites for a hit album. People feel that they make a song sound almost classical."

"Prince is intelligent. He never visits the studio when I am working for him; and I have never met him in person. He sends me memos and we talk over the phone. Once I sent him my Grammy-winning CD. I heard from people that were present at the time that while he took out the disc he looked away from the cover, saying, 'I don't want to know what he looks like. It is working just fine as it is.' Prince does not want to meet me because he knows that the minute he walks into a studio he will start interfering. It is uncommon that a person with such a strong ego realizes that I have an ego too."

"I am one of the best kept secrets in jazz history. Many of my early records are hard to find and it is still difficult to release new ones."

"For my whole life I can’t remember not doing what I’m doing now, and I’m seventy. I was picking out four-part harmony at eight and nine years of age on the piano. Why? I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is it’s there and harmony is something that really stimulates the hell out of me. I just saw each thing as a logical exposure to something which I developed further."

"I had a concussion nine years ago, and that changed things. I had always been sensitive musically, but now, since the concussion, I find the emotion is there immediately. There is no build. I hear several chord changes — it could be three or four chord changes from a string orchestra — and, man, I’m just gushing tears. I don’t take it as a weakness. Sometimes it might get slightly embarrassing to observers. On the other hand, I’m not putting it on. I’m in no way trying to exaggerate feeling. My feelings are exactly the opposite. Sometimes I wish I wouldn’t be quite as sensitive because then I wouldn’t have to go through this thing when I write."

"You have to recognize those writers who are artists in the same sense as the musicians. “Catching colds and missing trains.” Man, I wish I could say something that clever. Johnny Mercer was a wonderful lyric writer. You have to appreciate those. And then you get into the other thing where the lyricist says, “It’s not the composer, it’s what the lyricist did that’s important.” Come on. When I find a song that is equal parts of both, that’s a damn good song, and that’ll be one of the songs I use all the time."

"In 1964, my first steady job in the studios in this city was with the NBC Orchestra playing for the Andy Williams Show. So who comes on that show but Antonio Carlos Jobim. And he comes over to the orchestra, doesn’t say a word to me. He sits down to the piano and starts playing a bossa I had written that the Hi-Lo’s recorded. I mean, he’s heard of me?"

"I found, once I passed the age of forty, that I have a good sense of humor. It’s only through that I can keep stuff off and go through my life. If you sit and try to take on everything that is going on out there, you’re going to end up with problems. That’s where I feel music. And music becomes the way in which I express feelings. And, because it allows me to have contact with my emotions, it’s a constant catharsis, not just playing and writing. By doing that, you alleviate something inside of you. And who knows where that comes from?"

"I had gone to hear the winner of that year's drum and bugle corps competition. That band played a chord that made every hair on my body stand up. I've been in front of great symphony orchestras, and the greatest bands, but I've never had my hair stand up quite like that. That's when I decided to write for the bugles."

"You get tired of dealing with how other people think of what you're doing. It finally gets to the point where you realize that if you're going to do it the way you want, you have to do it yourself. That might mean putting up the money to do it yourself."

"I'm a writer who plays the piano. As I write, I find new things I like. I make them into what I call principles, and they become part of my playing vocabulary. That's the secret of what you get from composing. You get to discover things that you wouldn't ordinarily do. Much like a speech pattern, your improvisation patterns can get stale if you don't keep building your vocabulary. Each time you re voice something, you change the sound. When you do this enough, you get used to those sounds, and they start to come out as you play. You end up using voicings that aren't common, which gives you an auditory identity."

"Prince either uses or doesn't use what I have. When he gets it, I understand he listens to the strings separately, he'll listen to the brass separately and the woodwinds separately and then he'll put it all together and listen to it. So when we got to his movie, Cherry Moon, most of the music that was what you might refer to as the 'underscore' was the backgrounds that I had written for certain songs of his, that he took the voices and his part out. Now I would have preferred to write the individual sections, but on the other hand, it worked out just fine."

"How did I get to Lee Konitz, when everybody else was doing Charlie Parker? The sound, for one thing, the notes that he played—man, it just knocked me off my feet! When Lee was first playing, God he was inventive! I worked out so many solos of his off the records, from when he began recording with Tristano and Warne Marsh in 1949. I listened to Charlie Parker but I was not a fan—he was repeating himself too much."

"Tristano was too contrived for me; he sounded terribly planned. Lee is very intuitive. One of my proudest achievements was when I finally got to play the saxophone well enough that I could improvise on it. I aimed to have a tone like Lee Konitz—but I don't necessarily think I got there!"

"When I had a big band in the late 1960s, though, Warne and I were working quite a lot together. Warne would be turning time around, and dealing with cross-the-bar structures, and starting phrases in odd places—his intuition was really far out! He was one of the greatest players ever."

"Scotty and I became good friends. We had an immediate musical rapport that was sensational. We did a lot of listening and talking. Besides technique, he had governing, control. I think he was the first bass player who was fleet-footed in the musical sense. [...] What a trauma! It struck me right down—that someone I was developing such a relationship with would suddenly not be there."

"Wow Factors: Absolute integrity is a must, but it's also the emotional content that will get the listener. A Memorable Performance: Taking my children to see Duke Ellington perform live in L.A. with his big band around 1970. His sax section is irreplaceable. Advice for Achieving "Wow": There is only one level and that is professional. You must do whatever is required to achieve that in every performance. Audition Tips: Anybody can show off with flashy displays, but when a performance exudes maturity, that can only come as a result of deep, heartfelt contemplation. That person will stand out. Sensing Something Extraordinary: When you are reduced to tears by the sheer beauty of what you are hearing. Who Would You Like to Hear? To be able to hear J.S. Bach take a melody and improvise what amounts to a spontaneous composition is the most amazing thing I can think of. Have Wow Factors Changed? Audiences tend to be fickle. I've been lucky enough in that many musicians attend my concerts, so that I can just be myself."

"His chord voicings, whether in the left hand alone or in the frequent two-handed block chording, are simply extraordinary. When the inner voices shift while the bass note stays the same, it can be difficult to tell just what the chord is and how it’s functioning in the phrase, but the sense of movement, of progression if you will, remains clear. This dense harmonic interplay reaches an apogee in “Du, Du, Liegst Mir Im Herzen,” a traditional tune that Fischer makes very affecting by keeping the melody virtually intact while the chords quietly tie themselves into knots."

"Rule #2: In general, the higher notes of the basic chord structure (the 9th 11th, and 13th) should be placed somewhat higher in the voicing than the root, 3rd, 5th, and 7th. There are many exceptions to this rule, and at least one highly respected jazz pianist, Clare Fischer, develops his unusual harmonic colors specifically by violating it."

"My “super idol” (since the time in the early ‘50s when we played together in dance bands in Northern Indiana at various summer resorts) is Clare Fischer. The consistent, high quality of his work sets him apart. For me, his command of melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation and “LINE” is unequaled – he is my present-day Bach!"

"When I met Clare Fischer I was 27, and I was very impressed with his beautiful harmonies. At that moment it was very important to me because I was more into jazz than commercial music. And in that sense it changed my harmonic concept and opened up a wide spectrum of possibilities. Later, when I started working more in pop and jazz and in conducting and arrangement, that remained forever, even though those harmonic concepts don't apply to everything. But everything is always there."

"Clare Fischer is my friend. He’s not only a great musician and an exciting performer, but is an excellent composer and arranger. He’s bi-lingual and can bore you to tears on any subject from medicine and astronomy to politics and world history. I try to avoid all of these in favor of theology (about which he knows more than some preachers in my acquaintance). Since Clare assists me in my choir clinics, we travel by plane together a lot, so we talk about theology a lot (and occasionally disagree a lot)."

"Clare’s harmonic concepts are not limited to intriguing sonorities created by harmonic appoggiaturas and illusions. He also stretches the limits of the chord structures themselves, structures that remain unresolved, creating entirely new, stationary chord sounds. Read, for example, "Coker’s Blues" (from Extension), and "Quiet Dawn," where you’ll find many examples of new vertical sonorities."

"He is a master of thematic development. Like some of the masters of the Classical and Romantic periods of music history, I’ve seen Clare ask for a theme from an audience, then proceed to spontaneously render endless variations on that theme, at the piano, in the manner of a performance. Listen, for example, to his awesome nine and one-half minute performance of Yesterdays (from the album, Alone Together at the Brunner-Schwer Steinway), treated like a theme and variations form, taking it through several keys, in 4/4 and in 3/4, changes of tempo, and several different styles."

"I visited Clare’s home in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1952 (before he moved to the West Coast). He had to respond to a last-minute gig offer, and so I had the opportunity to speak with his mother in the meantime. She told me that Clare used to run home from public school each day to sit at the piano and improvise music that closely reflected his mood of that day. When he was happy, inspired, thoughtful, or at peace, she would hover in a nearby room to hear and love the beauty that would emanate from the piano. But she said that on those occasions when he returned from school depressed or in a foul mood, the resulting musical pathos would force her to run out into the back yard to escape being affected by the highly-disturbing, heart-wrenching sounds. Clare feels very deeply about his music, never writing or playing anything that doesn’t agree with his true feelings (at the emotional level) and his unwavering sense of musical integrity."

"What the chord symbols [B(flat)13#11 and A(flat)13#11] of the final two bars don't reveal is that the right-hand voicings are generated from two rising chromatic lines in a rather Clare-Fischer-like way(three names now?). In fact, the problem with this tune, now as when I wprote it, is that the chord symbosl alone don't tell the whole story. [...] As I discovered in my own version of "Wayne's World" - now, why didn't 1 think of that? - certain sounds can fit in between the counterpoint of melody and bass without reference to "proper" chord symbols. This was reinforced as I learned more about classical composers and the music of jazz pianist/arranger Clare Fischer in particular."

"The harmonic style of Clare Fischer is more chromatic than that of Bill Evans. Like Ellington, he uses several independent lines to develop a rich harmonic texture. His arrangements during the 1950s for the vocal group, the Hi-Lo's, were an important harmonic influence on Herbie Hancock. An essential aspect of his style is that the harmony is rarely resolved completely. There's often new or lingering dissonance, even at the end of a phrase, which gives the music a constant feeling of forward motion. Clare combines elements from Ellington, Konitz, Alban Berg, and Shostakovich to develop a fresh and personal style."

"If I had to make a list of the ten most important solo jazz piano recordings of all time, this recording would definitely be on the list."

""Quiet Dawn" is somewhat reminiscent of certain aspects of the work of Alban Berg, especially the stacking of either augmented or diminished chords in a manner which stretches tonality to it limits, while always retaining at least a hint of tonal gravity. In measures 10, 12, 13 and 14 Clare uses an interesting combination of conventional 4-3 suspension resolutions combined with tritone relationships in the bass. Measure 10, for example, combines the 4-3 suspension resolution of a Bb seventh chord with an E natural in the bass. The 4-3 suspension voice is also colored here with parallel major second intervals (Db-Eb to C-D natural). Clare has many varieties of this suspension variation in his vocabulary, and he traces them to such diverse sources as bebop chord substitutions and slow movements from Shostakovich symphonies."

"Playing the organ would be the renowned Clare Fischer, a brilliant keyboardist and jazz composer in his own right. [...] I saw Clare in the back of the room by himself, and now that I was feeling a bit more confident, I walked over to introduce myself to this jazz legend. As I approached, I stuck my hand out and began to introduce myself as the arranger and conductor of the upcoming session. Before I could get a word out, he looked up and said, "You're standing on my fucking wires!" Okay, then... nice meeting you too, buddy. Lenny Roberts, the engineer, was standing nearby, setting a microphone. He looked at me in shock before we both started laughing uncontrollably. We laughed for the next few hours during the session, and for the next fifteen years whenever it came up. Clare truly was magnificent and tasteful player, and contributed greatly to the sound of any album he played on. I suppose he was just having a tough day with those wires."

"I'm working with Natalie Cole this afternoon. We've been working on vocals lately, and we had an incredible string date yesterday down at Ocean Way. Clare Fischer did the string arrangements for a couple of tunes, and I arranged some others. Clare is a genius. The way he hears internal string parts is just incredible."

"Although many musicians have claimed a major role in the importation of bossa nova, Fischer is one of the few who can back up such assertions. In March 1962, he wrote the first bossa nova orchestrations created in this country, as part of an album he scored for Cal Tjader."

"On a recent evening, the bandstand at Donte's was occupied by what appeared to be three tall, sleek refrigerators, surrounded by a portion of the interior of a spaceship. These were in fact the amplifiers and main body of the Yamaha EX-42, an electronic organ allegedly as revolutionary in the keyboard world as the SST in aviation. This monster, which carries a five-figure price tag, is as yet almost unknown in the United States. On this occasion the owner and performer was Clare Fischer. During the set he allowed some of the rare experiments at his disposal to come into play. The EX-42 is capable of a violin-like vibrato; its sforzandos are like no other organ I have heard; and it has a piano stop that actually sounds like a piano, or at least one with thumb tacks. The pitch is adjustable from 432 to 455 cycles. It is touch-responsive, i.e. the quality and quantity of sound can vary according to how you hit the keys. The question that arises is how much better can the music be with all these aids to nature? The verdict is not yet in, but anyone as resourceful as Fischer will soon produce a favorable answer. Surrounded by Victor Feldman on vibes and percussion, Gary Foster on saxes, Larry Bunker on drums and Andy Simpkins on bass, Fischer played a charming Brazilian waltz and several beguiling pieces by Tom Scott and others. It is to his credit that he did not try to show the total sonic potential of the EX-42, which must be awesome."

"Because Clare Fischer and Terry Trotter, who co-led a quintet Tuesday at Le Cafe, are both pianists, it was logical to expect a piano duo performance. That, however, was not exactly what transpired. Trotter, who has racked up a long series of pop and jazz credits, played piano, sometimes opening entirely alone before the rhythm section joined in. Fischer's medium was an electric keyboard--fortunately one of the cleaner sounding, non-distorting models. The interaction between the leaders was secondary; much of the time, one would solo while the other comped. Fischer displayed his always acute harmonic ear in "Two for the Road," "Nobody Else but Me," his own rhythmically engaging "Coco B" and a blues. Trotter soloed with sensitivity on "I Never Told You," dedicated to its composer Johnny Mandel, who was in the room. Fischer's backup work during Trotter's solos, and also when guitarist John Pisano had the lead, consisted of rhythmic punctuations so incisive and attractive that he sometimes came close to stealing the attention; but not close enough to spoil the mutual feeling of pleasure in this totally unprepared, ad hoc quintet."

"[W]e liked to ask them to send us something that's as close to what the final mix is going to be, minus having the orchestra on there... They'd send us a tape, and I would take down everything, note for note – the vocal lines, the guitar solos, bass lines, drum beats; if there was a drum fill in there, he wanted me to write it out. The idea is that... he likens what he's doing to fitting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together. So if I point out to him every little part that's happening, every little line in the background, then he can see where the spaces are, and fit the puzzle pieces together. And that way he doesn't step on a vocalist with one of his string or woodwind lines."

"Now, we decided to start a little early to honor my father. You see, I find it highly ironic that one of the most punctual men in the history of civilization is now being referred to as the late Clare Fischer. He used to tell me a story so many times about when he was working with Freddie Hubbard, the trumpeter. Freddie called him one day. He said, "Clare, I'd like to talk to you about a new project. Can you show at my manager's office tomorrow morning at about 11?" And dad said, "Sure." So, naturally, he was there for the 11 o'clock meeting at 10:40, and proceeded to converse cordially with the manager for forty minutes. And then he got up and he said, "It's 11:20. I'm leaving. I'm out." And that was that. Months later, he saw Freddie at a gig somewhere, and Freddie said, "Clare, what happened?" And he explained to him about the importance of punctuality. And Freddie looked at him, and he said, "Are you German?""

"I'm glad I had the presence of mind to think, "You know, these performances aren't going to last forever, so I should enjoy every one while we're doing it, right now." And I'm so glad that I did that, because then, once I had my own instrumental parts down, I could just sit and enjoy what everybody else was doing, and absorb the music my father was writing. And along the way, I discovered that there are basically two distinguishing hallmarks to the music of Clare Fischer. One is an unconventional harmonic vocabulary. I liken this to a fine author. While most of us will go through life with a running vocabulary of about two or three thousand words out of the six hundred thousand in the English language, some gifted writers may know around ten or fifteen thousand. And it's not just that they know the words; it's how they use them. They don't just decide, "I'm going to be abstruse and vituperous." They put these words in a specific place at a specific time for emotional impact. And so it is with my father and his use of harmony. The second hallmark is his use of interesting instrumental colorings. He knew how to combine instruments and how to write for them because he had played almost every single one of them. And his favorites were the ones that, of course, no one else was using, like the ones you just saw up here – alto clarinet, contrabass sax."

"We first met Francis the day Clare played at the 'Manhattan Jazz Club' in Euro-Disneyland Paris. It was in February of 1995 and Francis was in South America. He flew home the day Clare performed because he didn't want to miss the opportunity to hear him play. He and Bernard Maury were in the audience and after the performance came up to Clare, introduced themselves and talked for quite a while. Then in February, 1997 we were in France again and again Francis attended a performance of Clare's in a nightclub in the Hotel Alliance in the St. Germain section of Paris. That night he invited us to join him the next day for lunch. He came to our hotel (He lived about 3 hours from Paris) and he and his son, Stephane took us to a delightful restaurant. The restaurant walls were covered with autographs and pictures of musicians who had at one time or another eaten there. We had a late lunch, the restaurant closed, but the owner kept us there to talk and sip wine and spend time together most of the afternoon. It was really quite delightful. Francis asked if we would ever consider returning to Paris and spend a lengthy visit with him in his home in Antigny. We were so pleased and told him we would love to. We received a letter soon after we returned home to affirm the plan, but heard nothing further.""

"So this is the man who loved animals with such intensity that he named far too many songs after every critter he ever encountered. The man who's written countless songs for his loves, his children, his friends, living and deceased. The man who, in countless pictures sifted through for this occasion, could be seen feeding birds at the drop of a hat, petting a stray cat, letting a dog sit on his lap; who loved children so much, took such delight in them, that he had to move right across the street from an elementary school so he could watch them play. My father, who brought me lunches at my grade school, and my friends lunches too. Whose laughter could fill a room. Who paid for my first professional recording and came to my debut gig at the Troubadour when I was fifteen. Whom I spent endless hours in conversation with, about history and philosophy and comparative religion. Who stole my Greek History books off my bookshelf. (I stole his books too.) This is the man I love fiercely, and I know that he loved me and my family fiercely in kind, and I'm forever grateful for that. And there's one more thing—well, two more things I'm grateful for: one is that the love of his life came to him, and for the last twenty years, transformed it in a manner I cannot even put words to, and I'm so deeply grateful to have her as my mother, and unspeakably grateful that my dad had that in his life. And again, I thank you all for being here, celebrating my father's life."

"I've been up past midnight all week, woodshedding [...] playing compositions by the great jazzman Clare Fischer."

"Hearing Clare's music that evening in 1962, was for me like experiencing a powerful earthquake. The blending of Ellington, Stravinsky and Shostakovich that we heard in Clare's improvisation and compositions altered everything for me. Later, in many generous sessions of instruction and encouragement, Clare said that, in his early teens, he had heard and transcribed parts of Ellington's ""Black, Brown and Beige Suite," Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," and the Shostakovich 1st Symphony. That was a staggering thought for a floundering saxophone player, and I often wondered then if plumbing might not have been a better chosen field for me. What came of Clare's youthful encounters with such diverse music was the creation of Clare Fischer, a composer, pianist and arranger whose music is at once a combining of every moment of beauty and life experience he encountered. Perhaps a favorite quote is proper here. This is from George Bernard Shaw. "The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.""

"And on , that depth and skill, stimulated by a change in the stale Gillespie repertoire and complemented by rich, radically imaginative arrangements by, I am told, Clare Fischer, result in a really classic album. Fischer, a young conservatory graduate, is a new name to be reckoned with."

"The most amazing thing, though, is that Fischer is theatrical. That is, all his tricks are just bright enough to keep the arrangements fresh without taking away from the sentimentality of Arlen's songs. He never gets solemn or super complex like Russo. If Arlen says the mood is "Bluesy," Fischer doesn't try to correct him. Fischer's overriding purpose, I believe, is to entertain. Conservatory-trained, he is rationing out language that must seem common currency to him, and trying to get it into the common currency of the public at large. I hope he succeeds. I hope that the Broadway boys will listen to him. I hope the jazz-band boys will listen to him. A half-century of the same voicings is enough."

"The vocal group, the Hi-Lo's's, were the greatest aid to me in harmony. I loved the harmonies they were using, especially Clare Fischer's arrangements, which I used to take off the record. By the time I studied theory in college, I breezed through it."

"Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept. He and Bill Evans, and Ravel and Gil Evans, finally. You know, that’s where it really came from. Almost all of the harmony that I play can be traced to one of those four people and whoever their influences were. And, of course, Miles."

"Most of my harmonic stuff comes from listening, for example, to the Hi-Lo's, and in particular, Clare Fischer's arrangements, which I heard in college. I learned about harmony from Clare's arrangements. Also I used to listen to one particular mood music orchestra--Robert Farnon's. His harmonic sense was incredible, even though it was only background music."

"[W]hen I was in high school, I formed a vocal group that was at first more like Four Freshmen harmonies—just this side of barbershop quartet. But then when I heard the Hi-Lo’s and Clare’s arrangements, I started writing more like that, and would write it down trying to figure out what they were doing. That was a big lesson for me on developing more advanced harmonies, and I took that with me to New York and all that. If you listen to Speak Like a Child, his influence is huge on that record, in the voicings and the harmonic devices."

"[I]t was many years later that I met Clare—maybe 15 or 20 years ago, in the A&M Studios in Los Angeles. I wasn’t working with him, I just found out he was in the building and I jumped up: “Clare Fischer?! Aw, man, I gotta tell him what he’s done for me!” And when I met him, he had no idea that I even knew him, much less that he was a big influence on me. I explained the whole thing to him and it tripped him out, because he told me I influenced him! It was really pretty cool. We just bonded right away; I could feel it, and I knew that he could feel it, too. There weren’t that many more encounters, but when I got to meet Clare and talk to him just those few more times it was always special. I wouldn’t be me if it wasn’t for Clare Fischer."

"An interesting modulating example is the jazz piece Excerpt from Canonic Passacaglia by Clare Fischer (issued on Alone Together in 1997). The chord progression, the bass line, and also melodic details are reminiscent of Benny Golson's Whisper Not (1956). Clare Fischer turns this model into a continuously modulating pattern d: i – ♯vi / a: ii – V – i which traverses the entire circle of fifths. The five bass tones D – C – B – A combine the descending line C – C – B – A with the zig-zag D – B – E – A in the m3/P5 lattice. The title Passacaglia is most likely a reference to the descending fourth-line (such as D – C – B – A). The deviation from the more typical descend (D – C – B♭ – A) with B♭ instead of B is in solidarity with the constitution of the fundamental bass pattern with B being a minor third below D. Despite the obvious similarities with Whisper Not, the Canonic Passacaglia by Clare Fischer (see Fig. 15) does not show the same kind of hierarchical organization. It is a chain of modulating 2nd modes through all twelve tonal centers, each of which provides a clear tonal anchor."

"Verve released an album by Dizzy Gillespie titled A Portrait of Duke Ellington. The orchestral writing was nothing less than brilliant, but, alas, the album gave no arranger's credit. The writing sounded like Ellington and yet not like Ellington; like Gil Evans, yet not like Gil Evans. It was in fact apparent that the arranger had studied everything and everyone and then developed his own highly personal approach to writing. Unable to reach Dizzy by phone, I set out to find out who had done this remarkable writing. It turned out to be the young man about whom Dizzy was so wildly enthusiastic, and this time I did not forget the name: Clare Fischer. Clare was at that time chiefly known as the pianist for the Hi-Lo's, the superb vocal group out of which the even more brilliant Singers Unlimited group developed. The Gillespie-Ellington album provided convincing evidence that he had one of the most original and advanced compositional minds in jazz."

"According to Shipton, "It is one of the least successful of Dizzy's big band ventures, lacking the authentic stamp of Ellington's own personality." I don't think it was meant to reflect Ellington as much as the broader instrumental palette that Gil Evans had explored. If, as Shipton suggests, Dizzy wanted a setting comparable to that Miles Davis had found with Gil Evans in Porgy and Bess and Miles Ahead, he had found the right arranger. But when Fischer arrived in New York from California, charts completed, he found that Dizzy, with the out-to-lunch carelessness of which he was capable, hadn't bothered to book an orchestra. Fischer had to do it at the last minute. Most of the best jazz players in New York were already engaged, and Fischer had to fill in the instrumentation with symphony players. They didn't grasp the idiom, and the album is stiff. In a word, it just doesn't swing. But the writing in that album is gorgeous; its failure is Dizzy's fault."

"Thinking back to the time, I didn't want to just make an Elvis Costello album. There were other things I was interested in. I also wanted to work with this fabulous arranger, Clare Fischer, which may not have happened if I had been working with Elvis."

"Producer David Z (brother of Revolution drummer Bobby Z) welds the tracks magnificently and Clare Fischer's inspired string arrangements give the album a conceptual feel."

"Clare Fisher, talk about a muse. He was my inspiration for getting the strings on the record. Clare had done work with my father—my father being the arranger and Clare being the string arranger. So, I had that “in,” although that was not how I was thinking about it at the time. Prince and I were listening to a bunch of Rufus records back in the day—and this was before we thought about doing strings on the first record. We were talking about how brilliant the strings were on those albums. I had also been listening to a lot of Claus Ogerman and Bill Evans. There's one record they did called Symbiosis and it's just one of the most beautifully arranged records. Ogerman's string arrangement, and Evans playing the piano over it, is some of the most beautiful music I have ever heard. The only thing that's ever come close to feeling as perfectly arranged in terms of the strings was on the Rufusized record. I just said, “Prince, why don't we get Clare to do the strings on our record?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “My dad knows him.” I called my dad and said “Pop, you gotta call Clare and see if he's up for it.” He was. We sent him the 24 track. He got back to us right away and said “Absolutely.” Within a month we had all the lead sheets and we had the entire score for the record. We went in and cut it and I couldn't have been happier."

"When Clare was sending something, Prince would get very excited. When's the tape coming? And when it would get there and first thing, he'd get in the car and listen to it."

"When he won a Grammy in 1984 for Best Latin Jazz Album,✱ he delighted his fans by giving his acceptance speech in Spanish."

"The string arrangement is Clare Fischer. I'd been waiting both for the material and the opportunity to work with him. And on this song "It Could Happen to You," which ends up just strings and vocals, I was at home writing, and I'd written this piece—[hums a couple of measures]—and my mother heard it. And she says, "Oh, that's the bridge..." And I said, "No! That's not the bridge for anything. I've just written it." She says, "No, no; wait a minute." So she phoned back 15 minutes later: "Found it! Here, listen to this," and played me Peggy Lee singing "It Could Happen to You." I'd even written the bridge in the same key. So, I must've heard this when I was six or something. So I made the arrangement for an acoustic quartet, and sent it to Clare for the string arrangement. And when I got there, he ran through the string arrangement. And I was just in awe of how accurate he'd taken the flavor I was trying to re-illuminate from the song. And I just dumped everything I had on tape, and left it as spare as that, because it was just... poifect."

"I'm a very big fan of this Brazilian singer-guitarist called João Gilberto. And this next song... um... his music inspired me to write it, three or four years ago. Turns out that he heard it in Brazil, and liked the string arrangements on it, which were done by the same arranger, Clare Fischer, who arranged the music for me this evening. So it's nice when something that inspires you goes round and comes back, and you're full circle.✱"

"[Stan Kenton] gave composers carte blanche to write anything they wanted to. The main problem was there was no money for rehearsals so all I remember is an unbelievable mass of notes going in front of my face and us trying to make a halfway decent performance out of it. There were some good compositions that came out of that: Bill Holman, John Williams. And Clare Fischer, one of my all-time heroes, albeit a bit difficult to get along with sometimes, wrote some magnificent music for that band."

"With special thanks 2 Clare Fischer 4 Making Brighter the Colors Black and White"

"Therese [Stoulil]: Please send 2 Claire Fisher 4 Orchestration. Tell him I'd like a full orchestra. There are 12 open tracks. Tell him 2 go 4 broke and play something thruout the whole song. I'll edit what I can't use. If he is unable 2 do the date ask him 4 recommendations of other people. Tell him I hope he's in good health & spirits. Thanks."

"At this point, I wouldn't want to jinx it by meeting him. His arrangements are incredible. I just send him a tape, we talk on the phone, and he sends me the finished orchestra tracks. Hear that? I'm gonna get that chord on the radio, baby!"

"Palmer comprehends (by dint of predatory maleness, I suppose) that this music is ultimately about seduction rather than romance. Clare Fisher's [sic] arrangements have the kind of brassy swagger and classy, stylish sweep that a ladies' man needs."

"Other losses that took a bite out of the music world: the swinging jazz piano of the incomparable Dave Brubeck, the lush arrangements of classical and jazz composer Richard Rodney Bennett, and Judy Garland’s musical director Mort Lindsey, who arranged her celebrated comeback at Carnegie Hall in 1961. And there was nobody more brilliantly talented than Mr. Clare Fischer, one of the finest composer-arranger-conductors in jazz for 60 years. He was the sound behind the Hi-Los, the sensational vocal quartet that revolutionized jazz singing in the 1950s, but he also enhanced the work of Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Evans ✱ and Cal Tjader."

"When it would come back, it was always, "Oh my God, this is so exciting." He'd get the FedEx package and inside would be the multi-track tape and on the stereo pair of tracks would be this orchestral mix that Clare had done. He'd push up the faders and there it is. I mean, there's something brand new. It was thrilling and really, really exciting. Those were breathless moments. Prince loved what Clare did."

"Well, voicings, I learned a valuable lesson once when I was in a piano club with Clare Fischer and George Shearing.✱ And it was Shearing's club. And it existed, I'd say, from '62 to '63; and then, unfortunately, he had to let it go, because certain members in the club went into the business side of the club as a political force. But that one year we were in his organization, I learned a lot from Clare and George Shearing about the technique of voicing. I was taught to just take any chord and, all of a sudden, just take it through every single key, every single imaginable voicing that I could come up with. Just runnin' through every single key. And Clare Fischer told me; he said, "Joe, you will get to that point, once you run everything through every, every single key," he said, "you will reach that point that you could just throw your hands on the keyboard and play blindly, and you gonna play a chord. you gonna play some kind of voicing." And that was something I worked on for years."

"By the time "Sonando" came around, I had already had a few friendly arguments with Clare Fischer about "Poncho" and "Straight Ahead," regarding my approach and style. Clare Fischer is a genius, a wonderful musician, but he overpowered me and my ideas. He had a different approach. I was always leaning more toward a typical style. I was coming from bebop and an authentic Latin style, whereas he would like a lot of electronic influences. By the time I signed with Concord, my other band was ready to record, so me and Clare split up in a friendly way."

"We went down and got a six-pack of beer, and we're coming back in the van – back to the concert site – and all of a sudden, Clare said, "Oh, look! There's a Jack in the Box! And we went... "So?... We just ate prime rib, dessert and all; and you say, 'There's a Jack in the Box'??!!!" Well, Rob was drivin', I was ridin' shotgun, and Clare was sittin' in the middle... and he said--he said "Pull in there quick! Pull in there." You gotta be kidding! We pulled in there. He got into the Jack in the Box line. "What do you want from here?" He goes, "I want.." Oh no, first he goes, "Do you guys want anything? You want anything?" We said, "Clare, we just ate a prime rib dinner! We just want our beer, ya know? And he goes, "OK... Give me seven apple turnovers." Seven apple turnovers from Jack in the box! They gave him seven apple turnovers. We took off, and there's a bag down here, and I'm shaking my head. "This guy wants seven apple turnovers!" We took off, and he immediately started eating two of them, fast. I'm lookin' at 'im, and sayin', "Damn!" And then Rob Fisher looks at me and says, "What the heck. I guess I'll get one." As soon as he put his hand in the bag, Clare grabbed his hand! He said, "Those are mine! I asked you guys if you wanted anything. I would buy you anything! Those are MINE. Stay away from them!""

"One of the things I liked about Los Angeles was that Clare Fischer, the arranger, used to organize something called the piano club.✱ It was an informal group of pianists, and we would meet at someone's house and discuss what was going on in the world of jazz piano. It became a good meeting point for all types of pianists, and as well as Clare, I remember meeting other players such as Joe Sample at those get-togethers. It was felt by some of those who attended that Clare had originally organized it as something of a shopwindow for his own talents as a player and arranger, but in fact the diversity of those who showed up took the spotlight off any one individual and we could really home in on pianistic ideas."

"Pianist-arranger Clare Fischer is a unique and complex musician who is both a modernist and a traditionalist, a purist and a radical explorer who has always gone his own way and, at the same time, held strictly to the rules of the road. For example, there is a remarkable moment at the end of our conversation where he brings together Latin, bebop, rock and roll and boogie-woogie in a way that summarizes fifty years of music in under a hundred words; that is typical of this man's unique insight and approach."

"I suspect your ability to hear into the heart of the Latin feel is not unrelated to your ability to converse fluently in the Spanish language, and to emotionally identify with where it comes from. I must relate a story to you. I was talking to Paquito D'Rivera, and he told me that he spent two hours conversing in Spanish with a gentleman at Disneyland about all sorts of things, politics and culture. A Nordic gringo, he said, and then he said, "I must excuse myself, I must go find this man, Clare Fischer. I've always wanted to meet him." And it was you; you said, "But I am Clare Fischer." And he had no idea who he was talking to. And he was startled at your fluency in the language and your ability to understand the culture."

"Walter Wanderley was very talented and very good with arrangements. I remember that there was a famous jazz organ player and arranger, Clare Fischer, and when we arrived, we were playing in L.A. and Clare was sitting next to Walter and paying attention to all the sounds and everything and he told me, "My God, I heard this guy's albums for ages and finally to be able to look at him and see how he does it..." So, you know it was very impressive because he [Fischer] was famous in Brazil as a jazz player, so he [Wanderley] was very very good. He died some years ago."

"I studied some classical giants, especially Bartok and Debussy, but didn't go too far into that realm for fear of losing my focus. I wanted to learn what made a string section really sing, then apply that to what I know and value in jazz. So my sources became Clare Fischer, particularly albums he'd done with Joao Gilberto; Claus Ogerman's things with Michael Brecker, including Cityscape (Warner Brothers); and Eddie Sauter on a a superb album by Stan Getz, Focus (Verve). These men are geniuses, and their music is timeless."

"Saxophonist Tom Scott, bassists John Patitucci and Jeff Berlin, keyboardist Patrice Rushen and drummer Ndugu Chancler are but a few of the L.A.-based contemporary jazz talents who are taking part in "A Tribute to Clare Fischer." [...] The event, which will be emceed by the ever-chipper Chuck Niles, is sponsored by Musicians Wives, Inc. and is being held to offset medical expenses incurred by the Grammy-winning Fischer, a keyboardist-composer-arranger who suffered severe head injuries in an accident in July. Fischer, who has worked with Cal Tjader, orchestrated for Dizzy Gillespie and Prince and had his tunes recorded by Art Blakey, is recuperating at his Studio City home. "Though he's still suffering from short term memory loss, dizziness and depression, he's greatly improved and the latest CAT scans show that blood clots in his brain that showed up after the accident have almost disappeared," said the keyboardist's son, Brent Fischer, a percussionist who plays in his father's band.✱ Fischer said his father is back to playing every day, and "he wrote a new song as soon as he came home. He's just taking it easy, reading and talking to a lot of old friends who are wishing him well." Not only will attendees at the tribute hear a lot of good music, they will be eligible for door prizes which range from a Kurzweil K-1000 synthesizer to signed LPs by Prince and Paul McCartney."

"Everyone who listens to me regularly, either on the radio or in person, knows that I like the music of Clare Fischer. I think he is a brilliant and talented musician who writes and plays beautifully. As a matter of fact, I like his work so well that I recorded two of his works instead of two of my own on my most recent album. Horace Silver once said if you know a man's music you know the man, so I feel know Clare Fischer very well. [...] On hearing some Clare Fischer compositions, the listener is frequently captivated by deceptively simple melodies and harmonies; however, in playing or analyzing those same compositions, the ingenuity and logic of the composer's solutions to his musical problems become much more apparent. The melodic intervals and harmonic progressions are far from ordinary. Even when he pays conscious tribute to musicians he admires, Fischer creates original impressions within the framework of the Ellington, Tristano or Gil Evans tradition without losing his own identity. His writing may combine the looseness of an Ellington or Evans chart with its "breathing space" for soloists, or it may incorporate the long-lined Tristano-inspired unisons with less obvious musical devices to make a musical point, but through it all he establishes a mood and maintains it."

"Before: Is that Clare Fischer? He does some tenth things like that. After: I actually got this record around the same time I got a Clare Fischer solo piano record. And I'm struck by the similarity between their approaches. Both have beautiful touches in the upper register... can make the piano sing."

"One day my aunt went to the record store without me and came home with a number of records, including this one. I loved it. It wasn't a jazz record, but it wasn't a soul record either. Chaka Khan undersang everything. She wasn't up to her usual wailing tricks. The most notable presence on Ask Rufus was Clare Fischer, the uncle of the drummer, André Fischer, and a legendary string arranger in his own right. Orchestral work in black music is nothing new—Philadelphia created an entire genre based on adding orchestral arrangements to songs. But there's something about the beauty of darkness that Clare Fischer adds to these records that's just haunting. This was also a Sunday record in my house. My parents were going to do an extended trip to Louisiana and Miami, gone five weeks. When they told me how long they'd be away, the string breakdown of "Egyptian Song" came on. It's a soundtrack moment, a perfect illustration of childhood sadness, lush and spare and at the same time, creepy. And then the story got sadder, at least for me. In Louisiana, Aunt Karen met a man at a restaurant. It blossomed into romance and they decided to get married. When the grown-ups got back from that trip, my parents gave us another talk: We're not going back out on the road again, no, but Karen's leaving. She took the record with her."

"There are passages on a recent album (in which Fischer collaborates with vibraphonist Cal Tjader) that mark some of the deepest, most profound marshaling of jazz, African, and Latin American elements yet heard (Verve V6-8531). "El Muchacho," for example, is the first step forward since the failure of Liebermann to cross-fertilize mambo and concert music validly. [...] At the time that Reed wrote "El Muchacho," he was not aware that he had written a composition that was a natural for further deeper blending with the mambo. But Clare Fischer was aware of this fact, and on this album triumphantly demonstrates that mambo is a still unfinished solution to a still stimulating problem by means of punning on the ostinato patterns of the Mexican son with the ostinato patterns of Afro-Cuban. For those sensitive enough to comprehend his special flair, he has opened the door on a new phase of tri-hybrid blending. And not a moment too soon. For the Castro revolution has cut the traditional ties between Cuba's Tin Pan Alley and our own popular music, and the next Latin dance may well have to be internally generated."

"His work with Cal Tjader on mambo "Alonzo" is a demonstration piece of the virtues of sober revolution. Alonzo opens with a suitably propulsive riff but so celestial are the high-pitched inventions that flow easily and comfortably in the course of this composition that the introduction is retroactively shown to be almost to be in bad taste. Never has a sharpened academic skill more convincingly enriched a piece of dance-hall music. So expressive is Fischer's personality that one can even detect his hand in normally anonymous ostinato patterns. Surely "Alonzo" will inspire Afro-Cuban musicians in the United States to rebel, at least occasionally, against the strictly chiseled conventions of their octave style of accompaniment."

"We all spent a lot of time and energy figuring out what musicians would best bring the music to life, eventually deciding that we shouldn't overthink things and just hire the best, because—and I've found this to be more true in the music world than anywhere else—you have to spend money to make money. The great Claire [sic] Fischer delivered some beautiful string arrangements, and the great Jerry Hey did the same for the horns."

"Between them, Dizzy Gillespie and Clare Fisher [sic] have come up with one of the most thoroughly delightful jazz sessions—small group or large—of the past several years. Gillespie himself has certainly rarely been heard to better advantage than in this program of low-keyed and lovely Ellington classics. This is unusual improvisational fare for his volatile, puckish trumpet, and he responds to it with some of his most sweeping, lyrical, expansive, and joyous playing on records to date. Fisher, until now known as the pianist and arranger for the Hi-Lo's, shows himself to be a most imaginative, witty and ingenious orchestral writer whose sensitive, continually arresting scores enhance the beauty of the original lines and gently but firmly goad Gillespie into solos of consistent taste and inventiveness. Inexplicably, Fisher's name appears nowhere on the album. Recording balances are insensitive at times."

"Fischer's orchestrations do not so much exhaust the possibilities of the genre as they delineate the full richness of its possibilities. In a sense, his charts serve to open one's ears to the limitless potential for significant, telling musical expression within the confines of the mood music idiom."

"Fischer understands strings; his writing for them does not relegate them to a subservient role in providing a soft cushion for the jazz improvisor. No, they are perfectly integrated into his orchestrations on a footing fully equal to every other element involved. [...] For a sample of absolutely gorgeous string writing, listen to the magnificent, moving "Sleep Sweet Child." (I understand from one of the participants that after the first rundown of his arrangement in the studio, the string players stood up and to a man applauded Fischer.) He will take it as the compliment intended if I remark that this piece reminded me forcibly of Sibelius' string writing."

"Clare Fischer has done what I wish Monk would do: he has written his own big band arrangements; the results are admirable. Fischer can make his ensemble whisper, sing, shout, praise, explain, cajole, proclaim. He is not afraid to be simple when simplicity will work; he can write for a mere quintet within the ensemble when he wants to."

"His string arrangements were weird because they went sort of sideways. They just cut across the track like there was a movie going on, but Prince wanted something dissonant, something weird, so I called Clare for Prince."

"What was Godowsky's method of teaching? As everybody knows, he was reported to be "a wizard of technique" (ein Hexenmeister der Technik, as he was dubbed unanimously by the German and indeed the world press). For this reason numerous young pianists from all over the world flocked to him, mainly in the hope of getting his recipe for attaining "virtuoso technique". Alas for them! Godowsky hardly ever said a word about technique in the sense in which these youngsters understood it; all his comments during a lesson were aimed exclusively at music, at correcting musical defects in a performance, at achieving maximum logic, accurate hearing, clarity, plasticity, through a scrupulous observance and a broad interpretation of the written score. In his class, he valued above all the real musician and approached with obvious irony those pianists whose fingers were fast and agile while their brains were slow and dull (and there were several such in my time). He would immediately lose all interest in a pupil whose hearing was inaccurate, who memorized wrong notes or showed bad taste."

"I suppose that he's an alter ego. But he's a little snarkier than I am - slightly wise. Kermit says things I hold myself back from saying."

"As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood."

"There must be a lot of shy actor in puppeteering. His work is the puppeteer's statement. It's his outlet. If I had to face the audience myself, as Jim Henson, I'm sure I'd be just a bit shy. But when it's your puppets that face the audience, it's different. That I can do very easily."

"Personally, I prefer working in the background."

"Frankly, I'm a lot more comfortable if I'm wearing a puppet."

"I couldn't do ventriloquism. I don't have any interest in splitting myself in two, the way a ventriloquist does — half-himself, half the dummy on his knee."

"It's an adventure story. But it's definitely not in our world."

"I've always thought that science fiction films set in our world have always rung false."

"I wanted to do a film where the creatures didn't look like us."

"It's a rather dark vision, actually."

"People shouldn't come expecting to see the Muppets because they are not here. This is something else."

"I was very interested in theatre—mostly in stage design but I did a little bit of acting."

"I've never felt any sense of competition with anybody, and we're all friends. We're all good friends."

"I do remember doing shows strictly in black and white, too."

"If any-thing, there's a difference in working with color in England and the color in the U.S."

"It has always been difficult to get Big Bird to be very pretty. Big Bird in England is much more gorgeous."

"The whole idea with the show from the start was to go international."

"I really began to appreciate puppetry [while doing Sam and Friends]."

"There are so many forms of puppets. The ones on 'Sesame Street' are probably the most simple that we do."

"With 'The Muppet Show' we used to play with a lot of different styles. That's what it was: a variety thing."

"The puppets in 'Dark Crystal' were very complicated, and some quite unpleasant. In that movie, I think we got into areas a bit too realistic."

"With puppets, I don't think you should try to duplicate what humans do. It can cause problems."

"Puppetry's a lot harder than people realize, and it's particularly difficult doing a movie. You have this scene with all these puppets, and when something goes wrong, you've got to set the whole thing up to do it again. With people, you ask an actor to walk across the room a second or third time, and he does it. That's it."

"In actuality, Muppets was a word we just coined. It was merely to be the name of our act. ... I used to say to people that it was a combination of 'marionettes' and 'puppets.' ... But then I stopped telling this lie, and I'm back to the truth: It just came out of midair."

"No, I don't believe we've ever designed a character around a person. Usually, we start out with a kind of personality."

"With Big Bird we knew we wanted to do a large, a great big character. He should represent a child so he can make the kinds of mistakes that kids make, and talk about it and be out front about that."

"Puppets have the same sort of graceful aging that cartoon characters have."

"I'm sure Kermit will stay young a lot longer than I will."

"There are people who think that we should never reveal anything, never show puppeteers and all of that. It tends to be something that parents worry about more than kids, because kids work just at face value."

"I know parents are often concerned: 'Oh, no, I wouldn't take my kids into the studio because it would destroy all their illusions.' It's a fairly adult concept."

"We started off with this fairly grand concept of, if you were to tackle it at a children's level, eliminating war. What would you do?"

"A lot of the shows relate to interrelationships and attitudes, again, always trying to do it within the context of a very entertaining show."

"Many creative people have a certain degree of dissatisfaction with the status quo, the established way. If you look at things differently, you are thought of as 'different.' In turn, 'different' people are thought to be 'mad.'"

"I think it's good to be your own person. But individuality is a mixed blessing. People who are 'different' are isolated."

"I always felt that I was not a part of things in general. I've always been outside of things."

"Even as a kid, I felt isolated. Isolation makes you sensitive. As a kid, I felt I was the only person who was like that. But there's a good side to isolation. It makes you sensitive, and sensitivity is part of the creative process."

"There's great value in being able to step back and laugh at yourself, at life and at attitudes. Laughter helps you put everything into perspective."

"When you trick people into laughing at themselves, that's wit. If you don't laugh at yourself, everything becomes heavy."

"Sesame Street (1990-93)"

"Jim Henson was a one-of-a-kind visionary whose works have entertained and sparked the imagination of millions of people across the globe for generations."

"What Jim wanted to do, and it was totally his vision, was to get back to the darkness of the original Grimm’s fairy tales. He thought it was fine to scare children. He didn’t think it was healthy for children to always feel safe."

"What do we want our children to get from Henson’s work? The same thing we learned from it. The philosophy of a gentle dreamer. The message that was encapsulated in “The Rainbow Connection” – the one about the “The lovers, the dreamers, and me.” It’s the idea that life is about making a difference, a positive change. And we’ve all heard it, even the Howard Roarks among us, calling our names."

"Henson was, by all accounts, a bit of a saint. Read any biography of the man, and you will walk away almost suspicious of his overwhelming decency and personal integration, his unfailing optimism and boundless energy. What made the biggest impression on those around him was apparently not his astounding creativity, but the passionate and compassionate way he lived his life."

"... Henson reportedly distanced himself from his church as he grew older, downplaying sectarian concerns for the sake of reaching a wider audience with his somewhat amorphous message of hopes and dreams and rainbow connections. (The urban legend that Henson died because of Christian Science-based refusal to receive medical care is just that: an urban legend.) Vestiges of Mary Baker Eddy do surface occasionally in his work, in the form of a can-do sunniness about the human condition that would be a lot more cloying if it weren't dressed up in so much inspired silliness."

"Silliness, in fact, is where Henson shone. It kept the feel-/do-good-ism from ever succumbing to the piety of political correctness."

"His faith in humanity began from an acknowledgement of limitation, not an illusion about perfectibility. He knew that joy flowed from honesty, rather than around it—sound familiar? In a similar way, Christians, whose identity is found apart from our ever-changing and often hopeless abilities and attributes, are free to laugh at ourselves. This is part and parcel of Christian joy."

"Henson may have preached self-belief, but all his stories find people desperately in need of (and finding!) help from others. Despite the sometimes insufferable can't-we-all-just-get-along aspect of Sesame Street (and let's face it, Fraggle Rock) much of Henson's work dealt more seriously with human suffering, both self-inflicted and otherwise. The Dark Crystal (1982) is nothing if not a parable of Fall and Redemption, and Labyrinth (1986) has a distinctly Pilgrim's Progress-like, um, progression. Henson may have believed with all his heart in a "positive view of life," but his work reflects a larger truth."

"Indeed, Henson understood that to truly reach another person, you must aim beyond the intellect, at the heart—at the unguarded, joyful corner of the soul known as the inner child, which, incidentally, is where Jesus was especially focused. Puppetry and humor were Henson's tools for penetrating adult defenses."

"While the post-Henson outings have all had something to recommend them, his absence has been acutely felt, not the least in the character of Kermit, whom Henson voiced. One almost wishes the Muppet-verse had had the good sense to retire the green felt when Henson shuffled off the planet. Kermit's scenes are too often marred by the nagging (and distracting) feeling that we're dealing with an imposter—a toad in frog's clothing, if you will."

"While there's no doubt Henson was a master craftsman and puppeteer, his true artistry lied in the way he channeled his soul into his work."

"Henson gave his creations such vivid personalities, wit and expressions it was easy to believe each had a beating heart beneath the felt."

"Henson was an innovator from the start: At a time when many TV puppets relied on wood and strings, he opted for softer materials like felt and foam. This enabled his creations to express a range of emotions, unlike, say, an eternally grinning Howdy Doody."

"Jim was tall. He was gentle. He sounded like Kermit when he talked. He was enthusiastic and filled with ideas. He was also an astonishing performer."

"There's not much to the Kermit puppet—it's practically a sock. But when it was on Jim's hand, there was another creature in the room."

"Jim giggled when he laughed. His sense of humor could be sly and wicked."

"The people who worked for Jim felt like family and he treated them like family."

"Yo, this one here, goes out to all my players out there man, you know."

"Nobody wants to see us together, but it don't matter. No, because I got you babe."

"As life goes on I'm starting to learn more and more about responsibility."

"It's been so long that I haven't seen your face I try to be strong."

"When I see you I run out of words to say I wouldn't leave you, Cause you're that type of girl to make me stay."

"Of course there is a monkey. There is always a monkey."

"The experience I had seeing Star Wars for the first time was mind-blowing. Eleven is a great age to have your mind blown. I will never forget that feeling of seeing "Long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away" fade out. It was the first time a movie made me believe in another world that way."

"It was nothing that I think any one of us took on because it was a gig that was available. It was something that felt like a true passion and something that every single person brought much more than any of us could have expected. … I do honestly feel honored to be part of this group."

"I’ve always liked working on stories that combine people who are relatable with something insane. … The most exciting thing for me is crossing that bridge between something we know is real and something that is extraordinary. The thing for me has always been how you cross that bridge."

"Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) is probably the most influential film of my generation. … That movie was the personification of good and evil and the way it opened up the world to space adventure, the way westerns did to our parents' generations, it left an indelible imprint. So, in a way, everything that any of us does is somehow directly or indirectly affected by the experience of seeing those first three films."

"When I was a kid and saw Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope for the first time, it blew my mind and around the same time, I had friends who were huge fans of Star Trek and I don’t know if I was smart enough to get it, or patient enough. What I loved about Star Wars was the visceral energy of it, the clarity of it, the kind of innocence and big heart of it. Star Trek always felt a little bit more sophisticated and philosophical, debating moral dilemmas and things that were theoretically interesting, but for some reason I couldn’t get on board. It really took working with all these guys and actually working on Star Trek for me to fall in love with that."

"We went from the silent era to the sound era, and now we’ve done it again. Now that we’re digital, I assume we will stay digital for at least 50 years. Everybody says, "Oh, you’re going to replace actors." You can’t replace actors. We’ve created duplicates, clones, but they can’t act. They’re a computer, for God’s sake. If you think back to what was done in the Star Wars films, it unbridled people’s imaginations. That of course fueled the business at ILM because they were being approached more and more to keep raising the bar. Actors will not be replaced: worst case scenario, they’ll have to wear a lycra leotard!"

"Marching into the woods in the darkness I'm Robin Hood breaking your fortress Light it up start the fire, gonna strike you Step aside cause I’m on my way to Rome, yeah I'm made of stone I walk the road alone Fighting for my throne Woah oh"

"Hear the beat of the drums Woah oh You better run run Woah oh Hear the beat of the drums Woah oh Cause I'm a warrior, I'm a warrior Cause I'm a warrior"

"Will you remember my name or at the end of the night is it all a game Or will you hold on to my hand together forever we will stand Or the sun will rise and you’ve had your prize And you don’t even know the color of my eyes"

"Tonight I’m gonna make you mine Oh wait, that’s not supposed to be my line I’m waiting on you to make your move Boy I know that you think your smooth Show me what you got cause I got a lot Come on set your trap I want to get caught"

"You’re falling all over me I’m losing myself in your mystery I’m afraid of loving you, I’m afraid of losing me I’m over my head and I’m seeing red But I’m waiting right here for you in my bed"

"I staggered through my career and came out the other end, alive. I made some films that meant something to me. In my opinion, they weren’t all great, and they weren’t all successful, but they sure were ‘me’. And this is what I was going through or thinking or feeling as a director at the time, and I’m very proud of them. A lot of great directors just never had the chance to have their work appreciated and celebrated and watched, all these years after they were made. So, man, what do you want out of life? It’s great!"

"There were two times in my life that inspired me the most. The first was when I was a kid, probably the most emotionally influential time, when you’re naïve and innocent. I went to movie theaters and fell in love with genre films in the 1950s, when there was a big wave of monster movies. My passion came from the young guy who was watching The Fly back in 1958. Then, going to USC I began to watch movies in a different way and was exposed to different kinds of movies, foreign films. We had directors like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and John Ford come down and lecture us. It was unbelievable!"

"When I think of John Carpenter, I am amazed at the fact that we take him for granted. How can we? Why should we? He is lightning in a bottle"

"My background in music came from me playing drums and piano as a young child. My grandmother was a pianist and I was influenced by her and my parents were playing rock records which influenced my drumming. I was a fan of film scores, rock, classical, jazz, and hip-hop in my early years and tried to learn as much about each of those genres as possible. I began writing music in a serious way in my teen years while I was playing in various bands and orchestras."

"I have an inner gage when I feel it’s too much, then I just don’t do a particular film. I’m lucky that I get more offers than I can possibly take. But I always want the phone to be ringing, because I want to do this for the rest of my life. I don’t plan on slowing down, but I certainly have to say “no” more and more. I consider myself very lucky to make a living at this. It’s almost bizarre for any musician to turn down work as much as they to have to keep themselves sane. I know what my limit is. And I keep myself at that limit."

"A lot of women play guitar very respectfully, and they play with the guitar; they don't play it—they play with it."

"I don't think that Anne or I had any concept that we were unusual to have this idea to go straight for The Beatles-type thing. So, completely without a sexual reference involved, just strode in the door and made a band, or two, or three."

"I tend to overplay—I play too hard because I've felt competitive in a room a lot of times with guys as a player, so I'd just play really dynamically."

"Composing a score is like getting in one of those mini-submarines that take you to the bottom of the ocean. You crawl into this little bubble, seal yourself away from the outside world and dive deep into uncharted territory. Sometimes the places you explore are dark, sometimes they’re light. If you have the right tools and knowledge you can explore wherever you like and have a great experience. It’s a crude analogy to genre hopping, but it’s accurate. I was lucky as a kid to be exposed to so much different material. I watched cartoons and read all kinds of comics as much as I buried my head in scary stuff. It makes going from talking animals one day to shape-shifters the next pretty easy. Truth is, most composers are pinballs. They can bounce around from style to style and adapt really well."

"Games run primarily on music loops. Each piece is composed to cycle during gameplay so it’s important to create music that doesn’t get monotonous or annoying and has very exact pacing. The use of themes, signature motifs and rhythmic passages needs to be arranged so they remain effective when played over and over. In a film, it’s a one-time-through experience. Tracks are scored tightly to picture and each track is crafted to exactly match what’s going on on-screen. Scoring in such a precise manner wouldn’t be practical in games because of the dynamic environment of gameplay. It can be different each time you revisit a level or area of a game, whereas a film is intended to play one way every time."

"Horror has many iterations, many shades. Landing the perfect balance of melody, texture and sonics is the key to a great score. Some horror films require a huge, aggressive palette. Others are the complete opposite. Finding that musical happy place is what will make the movie from a score perspective."

"This woman was Cathy Berberian, a personality in her own right, an artist of the rarest kind and a splendid singer to boot. Everything she did bore the hallmarks of authenticity. Whether it was early music (Monteverdi) or contemporary works (Berio, Kurt Weill and Stravinsky), everything rang true. And as for Debussy, I don't think anyone could sing him better. She has a way with Sprechgesang that won me over completely. She's a mistress of metamorphosis, a female chameleon. At the time of her concert, she was suffering from a dreadful cold, but it didn't stop her from singing for a moment. Mastery and total freedom. And the wit that she brought to her impersonations! And the way the danced the Azerbaijani song, as well as the Offenbach and Gershwin! What a phenomenal talent!"

"Every challenge along the way With courage I will face I will battle every day To claim my rightful place Come with me, the time is right There's no better team Arm in arm we'll win the fight It's always been our dream"

"I wanna be the very best Like no one ever was"

"I am invisible, he thinks often. And Exempt. Immunity has been granted me, for I don ot lose my cool. Polarity is selected at will, for I am not ionized and I possess not valence. Call me inert and featureless but Beware, I am the Shadow, free to could men's minds. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? I am the Dracula, look into my eye."

"My favorite aspect about horror music is you can literally write anything you want. You are limited only by your imagination! In fact, many times the more unique and completely original your music is, the better it works in the game and the more the developer loves it."

"I think any composer is the sum of their life experience, and that's what makes each of them interesting and different."

"When I'm watching a scary movie and there's a shadow or a flicker under the bed, that's scary because the unknown is so much scarier than when, two-thirds of the way through the movie, it's revealed that it's a guy in a mask. Once it becomes tangible and fixed in your mind's eye, it becomes a lot less scary to me and I think music is the same way. If you don't recognize that sound, your brain immediately tells you to run away. It's the shark fin in the water, it's hearing the music and then maybe you see a fin, it's all about the build up to the 'boo' itself and that has been my entire philosophy about horror music from the beginning – how unrecognizable is it going to be?"

"I got out of my record deal just so I could connect two cultures together."

"We figured out that these singers go to specific studios to record in Bollywood all the time. So if you’re a studio engineer, you see these singers on a daily basis. We reached out to the studio, pretending to have a lot of money, pretending to have a project coming in from Hollywood and saying we’d like to record with them, but we want this singer."

"I like visiting a lot of places, but I always am like, I’m just so glad I live in Baltimore. It’s like the perfect size city where it is a city and it’s large, but it’s also small enough where you can really feel like a part of a scene and a part of a community."

"I think the main thing I do every show, and I guess most performers do this, is engaging the audience, but I like to engage the audience in a very direct way right off the bat by starting the show with giving them the choice to participate or not because that’s the choice. By choosing to participate or not, you’re participating. Do you know what I mean? And I can figure out what their level of participation’s going to be and where I can go into crowd."

"I wanted to write a play about racism, about poverty, about the negative forces that haunt us and make us murderous—and the positive forces that do daily battle for us—like love, friendship, family—which lead to some kind of hope..."

"Respect your history, listen to your ancestors, tell the truth, and write your own story—or someone else will write it and get it all wrong."

"When I was 8, my best friend was raped and murdered and thrown off the roof of our building. That's when my serious writing began--when writing became an outlet for me to express my feelings and emotions…That is when I began to understand the power of writing. Other kids played stickball; I'd write weird journal entries."

"I think the audience I'd like to reach is increasingly an audience that stays home--a poor audience, a Latino audience, people of color, or people who feel disenfranchised. They're not going out and they don't feel entitled to theater. Theater is becoming more and more elitist because we just do it for each other. It seems that there are more theater people at the theater than regular people, and that's not good."

"Dare I hesitate to say that creativity might be in jeopardy because one of the key components of being creative is boredom and silence and isolation."

"…Hip-hop is an instant gratification, winners and losers circle, and often those who are losing give up after three or four, five years. I’m probably trendier now as a 42-year-old than I’ve ever been…"

"I still don’t know if I am truly creative...At times I feel like I’m a way better student than I am teacher or maker."

"I jumped in the river and there’s piranhas and sharks, but I have a 500-foot lead on them."

"A lot of us are afraid that we’ll get found out as normal. The reason why bodyguards and velvet ropes really exist is mainly because a lot of celebrities don’t want you to know how normal and regular they are…"

"I think that if we’ve done our job well and we articulate this individual’s life well, the themes inherent in that translate…It’s about legacy, about how much do we do with the time we’re given? And then there are themes that wrestle with the American character, but only in that Hamilton’s life is a rough-draft version of the arguments we still have as a country."

"There are a few people who only like hip-hop music, and a few who only like theatre music, and the rest of us just like good shit. It doesn’t matter what form it comes in. I think we’re all a lot more eclectic than we give ourselves credit for…"

"The honest answer is there are things inside me I want to make – Hamilton is one of those things, Heights was another. And since the success of Hamilton, my life has been about finding the balance between the things I always wanted to make and the opportunities that are so incredible I’d be angry if they opened and I wasn’t in them. So Mary Poppins and Little Mermaid definitely fall into that category. I think there is always a part of me that is checking in with childhood Lin and asking: ‘Would little Lin be freaking out about this?’ If the answer is yes, then I say yes."

"…I think if you want to make a recipe for making a writer, have them feel a little out of place everywhere, have them be an observer kind of all the time, and that's a great way to make a writer…"

"I hear a chavalo named Lin-Manuel in New York is pretty good."

"(Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?) …Also Lin-Manuel Miranda; “Hamilton” blew me away, and I can’t wait to see what he does next."

"I remember a young playwright of Puerto Rican descent named Lin-Manuel Miranda, who told us in the photo line before an evening of poetry, music, and the spoken word that he planned to debut the first song of what he hoped would be a hip-hop musical on the life of America's first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. We were politely encouraging but secretly skeptical, until he got up onstage and started dropping beats and the audience went absolutely nuts."

"They call, they call me the fat man 'Cause I weight two hundred pounds All the girls they love me 'Cause I know my way around."

"You made me cry, when you said goodbye Ain't that a shame My tears fell like rain Ain't that a shame You're the one to blame"

"Now there's no point in placing the blame And you should know I'd suffer the same"

"Music is like food. It is necessary for me to stay alive. It is a fundamental part of being a human being. It is sustenance, full of different flavors, full of culture and beauty... I also just really love food, so, this is my analogy, I guess."

""We’re all living double lives: There’s the skin we wear on the surface, and then the one we keep to ourselves – the part of us that indulges in curiosities and fantasies we wouldn’t dare admit to the world, let alone ourselves."

"I enjoy strategizing and planning releases as packages, not just throwing them out willy nilly. But honestly, in today's music culture, every form of expression becomes valid if you give it your authentic effort."

"Hot take: this is probably not the first time it’s Rapist v. Rapist for president"

"Men will tell you what you are From the day you are born ‘til the day when your heart stops beating They give you their names"

"He don’t know how the devil comes Right out under the midday sun How he hungers for a way to make control How he’d throw my body down How I’ll never make a sound How he’s waiting around the corner"

"The rules I want to break The games I love to play I know I shouldn't say It's burning up my time"

"We come together Baby, can you feel it? We're all torn up inside"

"You've got to know your power"

"It's midnight in Vegas And oh, I want to be famous And oh, I'm willing to get it just right for you That's why I'm spread on the bed tonight I'm feeling so dead inside"

"I make a lot of bad decisions"

"I have to know what I'm doing I don't know what I'm doing Not gonna lie to you No idea what I'm doing right now"

"When I wear the crown You bow down!"

"I can’t think of anyone more suited for Eurovision. She’s an LGBT artist, an absolute live performance beast, she’s drop-dead gorgeous, and her ever-changing genre-defying music would totally speak to all sub-fandoms. She’s made of the same material as Eurovision winners."

"I’m a huge fan of not overemphasizing music. Sometimes you can get a sense of music underlining things the audience already understands. And, as you say, silence is great. The more silence there is, the more chance you have to underline a newer moment with more refreshment."

"Frequently lately it’s reading a script, but that can come with some jeopardy because reading a script predisposes you to a kind of movie you expect to see, and then when it falls short of that expectation you have to realign. Sometimes the best experiences are when I know nothing about this movie, I’ve never met the director and I come and see something and I’m blank because then it’s coming at you in a way it would never come at you if you’d read the script, with an expectation."

"Film music is always and only accompaniment. Whether it’s loud or occasionally important in itself, it’s what it is because of where it is — how it’s placed in the film. In a film score, the composer literally measures every note, because it has to be synchronized with the picture. The film strictly determines every element of a film score. The only reason music exists in film is to help tell a story. No one hires a composer for a film to write pretty flute lines. I generally don’t get concerned about this, but I’ll admit to getting irritated or disappointed at times on how the music is used after I’ve composed it. In the United States, all film composers work under a condition called ‘Work for Hire’. Aesthetically, it can be soul-sucking."

"Being a composer, although I think it’s an incredible job, it’s not special. There are a lot of people who are composers. There are a lot of people who think they’re composers. There are a lot of people who are songwriters. There are a lot of people who have a musical idea. There are more now probably than there were when I began. There’s more opportunity, I think, for composers than there was back then, but there are many more composers now. So, you’re not special. You’ve got to find some way of getting hired. And I think the more you can refine your objectives, the better you are. The best advice I got about this when I was just starting was, “Ignore all of my advice and do anything you can think of”. And as I said, just get started. Just start."

"What’s really interesting about music and the audience, whether that’s a soundtrack audience or a listening audience… of course, we’re talking about soundtracks. My music was really designed very, very much to go to the image. I was never thinking about people listening to it without the image. There are some composers whose music really lends itself to pleasurable, interesting, listening, and sometimes, that music has been created and made listenable a little bit at the expense of the service of the movie; in other words, the ego of the composer. If you get in there and say, ‘Wow, this will sound so great with the orchestra and it’ll sound great on the soundtrack album,’ and maybe they can actually end up doing too much and writing ‘too many notes’ (laugh). I’ve always been surprised that people enjoy listening to my soundtracks, because I felt like I was part of a team – the filmmaking team. I always loved movies and I just happened to have the skill to create sounds and music and that’s just what got me on the team, but it was always about the movie. I think part of what makes a piece of music your favorite theme has so much to do with the movie and the impact it has, and of course, the synchronicities that occur."

"There were certain sounds in the 80s that were not, in my mind, desirable as a composer, because they kind of called attention to themselves in a nuts-and-bolts kind of way. Like, “pee-owww”. Oh, there’s that sound again, you know? A saw-tooth synth sound. But I really think that our job is to use whatever exists in the world, or even create an instrument for a score because there’s nothing in the universe that sounds like what your imagination is wanting for that film. Electronics and computers help that, but sometimes, literally, you have to take a piano string and string it across some kind of open box and bow it with a cello bow or something. You have to come up with a new sound, and that’s always fun."

"For as long as I can remember, the guitar and music itself is the thing that has gotten me through everything. Whatever it is I'm thinking about, or worrying about, or feeling good about -- anything -- the music has just been there. It's sort of like a model for the way things could actually work somehow. The music itself, just being immersed in the melody and the harmony and the rhythm of it, is so extraordinary, but then I think also all the people I've known... As soon as I started to play, it caused this circle of people to be there where everything was cool somehow."

"I think when a composer works on any score there’s never a moment when these kinds of thoughts aren’t running through their mind: while putting gas in the car, taking the dog to the groomer, grocery shopping, taking a shower, etc. Constantly thinking, digesting, and diagnosing."

"The majority of people that get involved in film music are kind of like me, who had a dream and fell in love with it and then pursued it on the base of their mad love for it. My advice to the young aspiring composer is that film composing is about the long journey, about developing over a period of time, of hopefully creating a career that is constantly rising."

"Mama, now I can breathe,...“This is a classical piece that reflects our current time, and as an artist, that is my job–to bring light into the darkness, to convey the pain of what I witness and experience, to inspire change…and, if I’m lucky, to escape the reality of America. Music is, and will always be, my therapy."

"People who are more privileged might have a history of violinists in their heritage. I’m the only musician in my family, which makes it a little difficult with questions like: “What College should I go to?” or “Where should I be playing?” It is difficult, and there are a lot people telling you not to [pursue it] because it’s so hard. Sometimes it can feel discouraging, but I’m someone who’s very driven all the time, especially in the face of negativity. It’s rare, in theatre, to see someone who looks like me and writes music, so that also drives me."

"The purest way to communicate the human condition is through the beauty of music."

"Ultimately I think about who I want to inspire, and I think it’s important to have people who look like me to inspire other people from my community to join orchestras."

"Another highlight was performing for Nas at his Watches of Switzerland and Haute Living event last year. Although I felt prepared as I arranged the backing tracks for my performance, I was extremely nervous. I honestly couldn’t figure out why because I have over 21 years of experience performing around the country, but this performance felt different. Maybe it was the legend himself or maybe it was extremely important to me, but I haven’t experienced a performance like that in a while. It’s funny that friends and family members of mine were telling me about how much they love Nas, the impact he had on their lives and how cool it was that I’d be performing for him. An old teacher of mine used to tell me, “if you’re nervous, then that means the performance is very important to you.” It’s quite possible that’s what it was, or it’s that I was star-struck, or I kept thinking about my family. I ended up having a great time performing and felt silly I was nervous to begin with."

"I composed original music to reflect the period in history and to pay homage to L. Frank Baum's touching story. The exploration of different genres of music (i.e. romantic, classical, modern, and folk) was used to express a purer sense of the emotions and the intentions of Baum's characters. There is a freedom in composing original music in a period piece. This story takes place in the mid-1800's, it is a fantasy that parallels the realities of that time in history. Oz is a dark and mysterious place, where evils abound, and there is an unknown about the future. Oddly, there are many similarities in the world today."

""A master in his craft, he possesses a natural skill in every aspect of his career, bringing musical compositions to life with his own signature flair. However, Hardy is also constantly pushing himself to evolve and challenge himself in new areas of his career, whether it’s taking on new genres of music or new projects, he does so with determination and an extremely charming and amenable attitude that has made him a natural star in whatever role he’s in.”"

"Me, Dr. Harmon, and the rest of the NOCO Center for Arts Entrepreneurship are so excited to have Mr. Hardy be a part of our team, serving as the Senior Director of Operations and Artist-Entrepreneur in Residence for the center!"

"Edward W. Hardy is a DA student at the University of Northern Colorado. Even before attending UNC, Eddie had built up an impressive resume of recordings, compositions, publications, and even produced an off-Broadway show in New York City!"

"I love a lot of different genres of music, but, to me, the most exciting genre right now, and probably for the past two decades, is hip hop. That’s where the most innovation is, although electronic music now is starting to produce some real interesting stuff, and I’m really digging on that a lot."

"The animation can go anywhere, and the music has to go with it. What is especially great from a composer's point of view is that the music in these shows gets featured, not buried; these shows appreciate the value of what the music is doing."

"There’s such cool mysterious sounds that I’ve sort of invented or altered, taken something that you might know as a, for a lack of any better word, a bell, and toned it down and taken the attack off, and it used to sound like “ding” and now it sounds like “wha.” So all these kinds of interesting electronically treated sounds are laying in there in a special way for me, and the orchestra plays along. The combination is really interesting."

"If you're judging any creative effort, longevity is the reward."

"I Think if I wanted to be famous, I would be working hard at doing that -- I am kind of working hard at not doing that."

"I've been told this is R&B, but it could be a few other things. It is certainly pretty neat, Warning: Very Sticky Hook!"

"All you have to do is give me Credit, which has led to my music being used in like, a million YouTube videos and over a thousand movies on IMDb..."

"I started making music because it was a problem that needed solving; it was very hard for filmmakers to get anything done without going through giant rigor morale, or at least it used to be."

"It is always easiest to write for the mood I'm in... and after a few hours, I am almost always IN the mood of the music. Because... that's what music does."

"I say! It is such a lovely brisk day! Aren't the horses lovely? I mean... look at all the horseness they have! They are scoring quite high on the horse-o-meters today! Nothing bovine on this street, Nay! ... ... ... Wait... I was trying to make a joke involving a horse's "neigh" combined with the archaic positive/negative usage of "nay". Then everything went wrong, and I said almost the opposite of the intention. So, without the joke: Picture a street where the only animals are the horsiest of horses... No cows or pigs. Okay, there are two dogs... but one of them is pretty small... and you can see a cat in one of the windows... but MOSTLY horses. If you added up the weights of all the non-horse, non-humans in the picture, they would weigh less than one horse."

"What is meditation for one may be cause for concern in another. - Some Elf"

"Picture a pixellated medieval village... cause that's what this is. It is the kind of music we think they played back in the day. It is not historically. But I'm okay with that, because we also didn't have lich-kings, lich-mages, lich-illithids, lich-warriors, or lich-archers. We did have lichens, though... I like lichens!"

"Welcome to the Holiday Inn, Airport. The presentation will begin shortly. SUCCESS starts with your ATTITUDE! If you are not EARNING, make sure you are LEARNING! AMBITION is the path to success. PERSISTENCE is the vehicle you arrive in. Success is doing the OPPOSITE of what everyone else is DOING! Actually... don't take this last one too literally. If everyone else is using the door, don't try walking through a wall (or whatever the opposite of a "door" is). I mean... there is a reason most people do the same things. Usually because they make sense. Oh, sure... it is okay to QUESTION what people are doing, but just doing the opposite... probably not great. The future of NETWORK MARKETING is UNLIMITED! Oh... Also a bit of hyperbole here. I mean, it literally cannot exceed the gross output of all the world's economies - and will likely top out far before that due to INEFFICIENCIES and REGULATION."

"This piece took almost exactly one year to go from initial idea to produced piece. What was I doing for a whole year!? I mean... it doesn't exactly sound that difficult."

"Is it a real Gregorian Chant? Nope. For one - there are no real words in it. Honestly, I don't want a religious exaltation mucking up my fantasy world. So if you're building a historically accurate "Monk Simulator: Year of Our Lord 882!", just move on. The other reason this isn't real is I never learned how to read that notation. There are insufficient sticks for the rhythms in the notation... I know, there is a real convention that you can learn. I just grabbed a few pieces of the sheet music from the 1200s, and guessed at how to do it. Sounds reasonable enough to me! (says the guy who knows virtually nothing about the art)"

"Background to an evil political action ad. Add your own alarmist voice over - this was engineered to make people uncomfortable, and not interfere with human voice range. "Tell your congressman to vote NO on the Pollute Our Drinking Water and Send All of Our Money to Canada Act.""

"Welcome to the tropical paradise of Port Horizon. Not much to do here but listen to the short wave radios and play guitar. There is also food and drinks with those little umbrellas... Other than that - not much. Except snorkeling. Snorkeling is pretty cool. Oh, there is also Art Night on Tuesday - where you get a volleyball and some paints and make yourself a friend! Beach chess... I forgot about Beach Chess. Don't play white against Todd, though - he plays all-Hedgehog all the time. Come on, Todd - just once, seriously ONCE could you play King's Indian or... you know what? I'd even take the French Defence; Exchange Variation, you boring symmetrical jerk."

"Oh! The horror! This is NOT a fun piece. It WILL make you feel like there is something seriously wrong. Did those veins on my forearm always look like that? I mean, they're doing a weird criss-cross pattern... and they look REALLY blue. I would have noticed that before, surely! I wonder if this has anything to do with the meteor that came down in Mr. Wilson's pond last night?"

"Part one of seven. Sort of an edgy-underwater feel... which isn't common. You can feel the struggle just trying to get the sounds out. Imagine a small rhinoceros at a tea party. The image you have in your head has nothing to do with this piece; But it is quite amusing."

"Part three of seven. Part pipe organ, part broken pipe organ, this isn't just spooky, it is crazy spooky. It also has a musical theme, which not all of this horror moody stuff has. Consider it the jelly filling in your horror doughnut."

"Part four of seven. This is the pizza cutter of this series, round and edgy. It has a little bit of melodic complexity, but mostly it just sits around being creepy."

"Part five of seven. Airy, but not in the "I'm outdoors, and everything is great 'airy'" way. More like the "the alien machine that sustains our life is slowly breaking down and poison is beginning to seep from its core" way. Whatever is happening... it isn't fast, and it isn't good."

"Part seven of seven. A real mind bender. This one is all acoustic, and no artificial synths, so it has an organic feel. Not Certified Organic, just normal organic. So, that means it looks better, requires less fertilizer, has fewer pests and a higher yield."

"Southern trap influenced rap pile of musical forklift platypus... okay, I don't know what these words mean. But if you understood them - we're all good. You know what you're getting, and... that's all I can hope for really. Truth in advertising!"

"Could be the thinking music for a quiz show about the paranormal? "Where does the Sasquatch typically vacation... is it A, The High Mountains... B, Unexplored Cave Systems... C, Graceland... or D, In another dimension - similar to, but not strongly coupled with our own reality. Take your time and answer whenever you're ready.... A, B, C, or D... Would you like to consult the Tarot or do an entrail reading?" I love the flute bits in this piece."

"You know when you watch a vampire movie and then you walk out into the real world, but you're still sort of in the fictional world because it looked like the real world... and that's where you are now. I call this Persistence of Fiction, and it feels awesome! Capture some fiction by playing this track while walking to the bus... er the Vampire Bus! or waiting in line at the Vampire DMV or sorting Vampire Direct Mail Ads or doing some Vampire Macrame."

"You know what's cool? A standpipe in the winter. I imagine this one with a hip mustache and a plaid beret. Enough of the imagery, this is a little downtempo chill piece with lush horn punctuation. Suitable for: walks in the rain, time-lapse videos, sad cooking shows."

"This piece was built almost entirely with arpeggiators. What does that mean for you? Probably nothing. But holy man! Does this sound like it is from 1983! So, pop a tape of "Flashdance" in your VCR... and then spend like 8 minutes rewinding it... because, apparently your cousin couldn't be bothered to do that. Seriously, Sally! You did the same thing when I lent you "Smokey and the Bandit II", and I didn't say anything because you had a hard week, but still managed to make the Jell-o Salad with the grapes for the family reunion... which was nice. Anyway, I'll probably just get you one of those $20 tape rewinders they have at Radio Shack for your birthday. I also enrolled you in the Battery of the Month Club. You're welcome."

"Yeah Boyzzz! BGM Music in the HOUSE!!!! In this case, "BGM Music" means "Background Music... Music". You want royalty-free!? You got it! You want ukulele mastery!? You got that, too! You want a piece that's a GNDN piece!? DONE! It's like a whole new genre of undistinguished music! It is sort of bouncy, and cheery. So... somewhat distinguished. It is really hard to hype this piece, but it is wicked-useful!"

"Stop it! Stop complaining, it is supposed to end like that! This is a loopable piece. Why? You never know how long your voice-overed tour of the cardboard factory is going to take... Or your real estate tour... Or your appendectomy video... Or your video of that one train by your house."

"So this one sounds like what is [sic] sounds like."

"Have you ever heard a 4 bassoon ensemble before? Not likely. While bassoonists may create temporary pair-bonds, they are never found in groups of 3 or more. Much digital trickery was involved in this piece to make them appear as though they were all in the same room at the same time. Tuba players, on the other hand exhibit extreme flocking behaviour, and have even been spotted in mass migrations."

"Co-written with Bryan Teoh while he was on vacation (Thanks Bryan!) this is all the mystery and chill groove you need. So come on you cats and swingers, enjoy yourself a Jet Pilot (served in a pineapple of course) and help unravel the Secret of Tiki Island! Can you save yourself and the island from the Volcano!? No. Of course you can't. It is a freaking VOLCANO. If the pyroclastic flows and lahars don't kill you, the carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide probably will."

"I gotta admit, I've never been to a clambake, only ever fish boils... which are similar, except for clambakes usually involve mollusks and giant sea-bugs, and fish boils involve fish. Also, clambakes are more steaming and fish boils are more boiling. You're more likely to see Green Bay Packers jerseys at fish boils, and more likely to see New England Patriots jerseys at clambakes. This music is west-coast, though... The more I think about it - the less useful this descriptive paragraph becomes."

"What is love? Apparently, it is an odd mix of 1980's synthy love songs and modern trap beats. I don't think there is anything like this out there... which may be a fine thing - or I've just invented a genre. Crooner-Synth Trap-Pop."

"Welcome to the lobby of the FUTURE! Luxurious automatic ashtrays, and modern green vinyl furnishings set off the shag carpeted walls. Enjoy a Rusty Nail from our cheerful bar staff (with a complimentary cheese and fruit plate before 5pm). We feature prime rib dinners every day that ends in a "y"! Remember to tip the bellhops at least 5 cents per bag. Enjoy your stay! This was written 2 years before it was published, because I didn't have a good enough upright bass sample to make it go."

"Part alien cacophony, part organic awfulness, part six of seven. If you set this piece as music you wake up to in the morning, you're going to have a bad, bad day. There will be half remembered monsters from the times of not-asleep, not-awake... whose only jobs are to induce unexpected nausea inside government buildings."

"After some amount of introspection, I can only conclude that this is the afterlife, or some entryway to the afterlife... or a really cool club in the Meatpacking district after-hours."

"The reason I created Jimmy in the first place was I’ve always been a huge fan of science and technology and space, but I was never smart enough to actually become an astronaut or become a scientist — my math skills aren’t strong enough."

"I remember we were at some club in Detroit, and playing all kinds of crazy things behind George, while behind Miles we played really straight. And Miles said afterward, "Why don't you play like that behind me?" That's when Tony and I began playing our little musical game behind Miles. After only four days, it turned around and he was leading us. And Miles began playing different after that. It was the most uncannily rapid adaptation I could ever imagine."

"I realized I could never be a genius in the class of Miles, Parker or Coltrane, so I might just as well forget about becoming a legend and just be satisfied to create some music to make people happy. I no longer wanted to write the Great American Masterpiece."

"I'm not a chauffeur. Nobody would have bought any of my records if I were. I'd have had nothing to say. I'm supposed to be presenting things to the public, not accepting requests. I call the shots. They don't have to like it. I really wanted to develop my career in such a way that I have the freedom to do what I want to do, and not have that considered bizarre. I think I'm finally at that point. People are no longer surprised when I come out with something different. I've done it enough now. That's what I've wanted all this time."

"Hey, man; I would never dare to sing alone and unaided. I mean, nobody would want to hear the sound of my natural voice. But by singing through this new machine, I can mix what I sing with what I play on the synthesizer and it comes out sounding like you hear it on Sunlight. [...] What it all means is that I can sing "I love you, baby" down while playing different notes with the same rhythm up on the synthesizer ... Now any keyboard player who can coordinate his playing with his singing can sing anything he wants to ... and be able to do all the things singers can't do that instrumentalists can."

"[B]y the time I actually heard , I started picking that stuff out; my ear was happening. I could hear stuff and that's when I really learned some much farther-out voicings – like the harmonies I used on ' – just being able to do that. I really got that from Clare Fischer's arrangements for the Hi-Lo's. Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept... he and Bill Evans, and and , finally. You know, that's where it came from."

"I didn't know whether Wayne was crazy or a genius. I knew something was there, but I couldn't get a handle on it. We were playing some club outside of Boston. After the gig, I got a bottle of cognac and went back to his hotel room and we drank. And we talked for hours. And I began to see that there were word games that Wayne would play. His whole approach was much more like poetry, if anything, than how we normally perceive standard conversation. His way of speaking was on a much higher plane. I did come to the conclusion that he was a genius, not crazy."

"A few months ago, Wayne Shorter and I were being interviewed after performing in a quartet at the . Before any questions were asked, the interviewer remarked that in previous interviews, responses from Wayne "tripped him out" so much that he would be discovering new meanings in Wayne's words for several days. He said that it wasn't just what Wayne said but how he said it that did the trick, and that he was looking forward to another mind-blowing experience. Even though I was the other interviewee, I was also looking forward to Wayne's profoundly creative and thought-provoking reactions to the questions. Reactions, not just answers, that are chock-full of wisdom. In his jovial way, and with an innately uncanny sense, Wayne says what a person needs to hear in order to expand himself. No, it's even better than that. It's more like, you feel that Wayne has gleaned deeper meaning from a question by using it as a springboard for an answer that will blow your socks off and perhaps change your life for the better. As a matter of fact, you might start to think, Wow, I didn't know my question had so much in it."

"redefined swing for modern jazz pianists for the latter half of the 20th century up until today. I consider him to be the major influence that formed my roots in jazz piano playing. He mastered the balance between technique, hard blues grooving, and tenderness. You'll find Oscar Peterson's influence in the generations that come after him. No one will ever be able to take his place."

"We all have natural human tendency to take the safe route—to do the thing we know will work—rather than taking a chance. But that's the antithesis of jazz, which is all about being in the present. Jazz is about being in the moment, at every moment. It's about trusting yourself to respond on the fly. If you can allow yourself to do that, you never stop exploring, you never stop learning, in music or in life."

"I came back to New York looking for a piano player. I found him in Herbie Hancock. I had met Herbie about a year or so earlier when the trumpet player brought him by my house on West 77th Street. He had just joined Donald's band. I asked him to play something for me on my piano, and I saw right away that he could really play. When I needed a new piano player I thought of Herbie first and called him to come over. I was having and over so I wanted to know how he would sound with them. They all came over and played every day for the next couple of days, and I would listen to them over the intercom system I had hooked up in my music room and all over the house. Man, they sounded too good together. On around the third or fourth day, I came downstairs and joined them and played a few things. [...] I knew right away this was going to be a motherfucker of a group."

"Tony would lead the tempo, and Herbie was like a sponge. Anything you played was cool with him; he just soaked up everything. One time I told him that his chords were too thick, and he said, "Man, I don't know what to play some of the time." "Then, Herbie, don't play nothing if you don't know what to play. You know, just let it go; you don't have to be playing all the time!" He was like someone who will drink and drink until the whole bottle is gone just because it's there. Herbie was like that at first; he would just play and play and play because he could and because he never did run out of ideas and he loved to play. Man, that motherfucker used to be playing so much piano that I would walk by after I had played and fake like I was going to cut both of his hands off."

"A lot of times I would let Herbie play no chords at all, just solo in the middle register and let the bass anchor that, and the shit sounded good as a motherfucker, because Herbie knew he could do that. See, Herbie was the step after and Thelonious Monk, and I haven't heard anyone yet who has come after him."

"Though Herbie Hancock has the chops to share a stage with Miles Davis and to create such jazz classics as Watermelon Man and Cantaloupe Island, he may forever be remembered for a one-off novelty track called “Rockit”, a song that (along with its groundbreaking video) was all over MTV in the network’s early days. As cracking a track as Rockit is, it is not indicative of Hancock’s style of electrified jazz. However, it does showcase that he was that rare jazz performer who did not shy away from the wonders of technology. It received criticism from purists, but Hancock was used to it. He’d gotten the same sort of guff when his Headhunters group crossed the line into pop and funk music in the early ‘70s. Nevertheless, the man’s playing is impeccable."

"I'm not a video person at all, I prefer to let the listener have their own impressions."

"Artists, especially pianists, have to be comfortable with themselves. It's what makes us unique. We have our own voice and process of creating. I'm not entirely sure I'll ever be completely comfortable with myself, but that's probably what pushes me to work harder."

"I am the complete optimist. But I'm also a very quiet, internal processor—a guy who kind of takes things in. I think that is reflected in my music for sure, just because that is my personality. I'm not a lively person but I'm animated. I'm not boisterous but peaceful, and I don't think that there is really another way to live my life."

"I’ve been playing for 38 years, and I will take lessons until I'm in the grave. There's always something to learn. We each have our own abilities — be it music, be it accounting, be it culinary. But there's this idea, why would anyone want to put a cap or put a ceiling on their craft, right?"

"I think what happens with classical music is that there is a concrete expectation of how it's done. For some people, that's their jam and I applaud that. I'm too sloppy of a classical player to be able to do that consistently. I want to hear colour and I want to hear and play something I've never played before. So that’s really where jazz came into it. You're learning a conversation, musically speaking, and then you're putting your own phrase into that."

"Melody is what makes a song a memory."

"In this quiet little Indiana town I will aim to bring together the song composers of the land so the young and ambitious may meet the veterans and successful members of the profession."

"There's not a city, or even a small town, that couldn't make its grandmothers happier, and make itself happier, by doing something for the old folks."

"If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition."

"We called ourselves, in those days — and I’m talking now about 1962, 1963 — sort of like a singing newspaper. We saw our responsibility as being very connected to making sure as many people as we could reach understood the complexity of organizing against racism in this country and that you were not always in a position of having a large march with lots of cameras present. Sometimes it was very tedious, mundane work, but no less dangerous. And so, we saw ourselves as really trying to keep an open window on the organizing activities going on in some of the most dangerous areas of the South."

"The African American culture is just a rich singing culture. When you take a culture like that and move it into a kind of crisis, a trauma state, which is what you would have to say happened with the civil rights movement activity, then you actually get an expansion and an empowerment and explosion of the singing, because the singing matches the increased energy coming out of the community."

"Slavery was a very violent system. And slavery did not just happen in the South; it happened to the nation. So, as a birthing nation, we are a very violent culture. And I think we are reaping some terrible, terrible fruits from what is integral to being American."

"I’m a historian and a radical, and I don’t see resurging something from the past to address contemporary issues. I think we really have to do something that is of the time we’re in to address what we’re facing. There is a major effort to resolve issues in this society by locking people up in jail. And it is absolutely expanding. So people are going into business, and states almost are going into business. It’s almost like — it reminds me, when I hear about a state like Texas renting itself out, I think about Kentucky and Virginia and Maryland breeding slaves. I mean, there’s a market now for locking people up. And there are states going into it. And there are corporations where people can buy stock into prison industries and prison-based industries. That means you have to build them. There’s a technology to it. And this is major. And I think the civil rights movement addressed an issue during its time. But I think we’re going to all be very challenged to get very serious about trying to find ways to respond in complex ways to what we’re seeing in our society."

"There is a need to understand that we are a culture created by a slave culture and that we still operate out of lessons learned and taught during a time when that system was intact. And so, many of the things that we learn, we learn there, the kind of women we learn how to be, the kind of men we learn how to be. If you can think of the batterers, the leading men of society beating people all the time and integrating it into their lives and into their personality across a 300-year period, you can’t tell me that’s not related to the violence we have to deal with. If you can — if I can tell you about the child abuse that a young child experiences who’s Black on a slave plantation, the battering that Black people experience, where you are whipped for anything, the sexual violence and sexual harassment, we’re talking about 300 years, formative culture in this country."

"You actually don’t have to lie about what kind of country it is, that there’s a maturity that’s implied in being able to enter discussions and studies about your history, that we need to see more of, especially in terms of our leaders, who seem very afraid to enter a period where we actually talk about these things."

"It is very difficult to be born female in this country and not be — not be fearful. One of the first lessons you get is that it’s a culture that preys on girls and teenagers and women. And so you go through your life with this little trail of fear as a girl and as a woman in this culture. And so, the Joan Little case was important to me because I thought, “Aha, they die!” — rapists, you know. I thought it was an interesting idea to add to this culture of fear I was living with. I owe Joan Little a lot."

"It’s a class notion that women should be in the home with children. It is a very narrow strata of females who have been able to be married, have children and be home. Most women in the world are forced to work outside of the home, especially if they have children, because there isn’t any other chance for survival."

"Bernice Johnson Reagon, writing what she called a cultural autobiography, recalled her childhood in the South in these terms: “My father would work from sunup to sundown/and would come home exhausted/eat, and go to bed/My mother would work from sunup to sundown/would come home/and work from sundown to sunup/to work from sunup to sundown again/The bottom line/When a dress had to be made for a play/if my father did not have the money to buy the material that was it/For mama that was just the beginning/She then had to figure out a way to get the cloth for the dress and/stay up all night making it/for this child to be in this play/It's called/making a way out of no way"

"The mighty, mighty voice of Bernice Reagon."

"The concept of "home" has a complex and sometimes convoluted history within Third World feminism. In an oft-cited essay on coalition politics, for example, feminist activist and artist Bernice Johnson Reagon argues for the importance of not confusing home and coalition. According to Reagon, coalitions need to be understood as unsafe spaces, defined by the presence of strangers and characterized by the dictates of survival: "The only reason you would consider trying to team up with somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that's the only way you can figure you can stay alive." In the space of coalition, subjects feel "threatened to the core," as though they might "keel over and die." It is for these reasons that "you can't stay there all the time." In contrast to coalition, Reagon characterizes home as refuge-the space of sameness, a potentially nurturing place where you "act out community" and "decide who you really are." Yet even here, she acknowledges that such spaces of enforced homogeneity (what she characterizes as "the barred room") can become destructive." Read in light of Reagon, Moraga's "dream of a unified Third World feminist movement" reflects Moraga's misreading of feminists of color as signifying "home" rather than a coalition. Echoing Reagon's depiction of coalition as a form of survival, Moraga argues that this diverse group of women "are not so much a 'natural' affinity group as women who have come together out of necessity." Yet despite offering a more contentious definition of community, Reagon's essay underproblematizes the concept of "home" itself. Written for a workshop at the West Coast Women's Music Festival, her remarks were given in the context of a black feminist speaking about coalition to a group of mostly white women; given the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Reagon characterizes coalition as the "monster" that "never gets enough" and "always wants more." This depiction highlights the burden of representation that feminists of color often feel doing coalition work in predominantly white environments. Yet Reagon's language of coalition sustains a dichotomy of community that leaves little room for the pleasures of difference. Instead, the encounter with the unfamiliar is something with which to make peace rather than from which to take satisfaction. In contrast to home-where there exists at least the possibility of nurturance-Reagon depicts coalition in strictly instrumentalist terms, as a burdensome and disagreeable necessity. While understandable, such a reading of home works to sustain myths of community that equate sameness with sustenance and solace. The strength of Reagon's analysis lies in her capacity to celebrate the necessity of an agonistic feminism that challenges the idea that women share a common experience simply by dint of being women. As she notes, "wherever women gather together it is not necessarily nurturing. It is coalition building."" Here, Reagon highlights a difficult reality: the work of democratic politics can be demanding and unpleasant. Encounters with heterogeneous others are often frustrating, exhausting, and fraught with misunderstanding. In its call to welcome such challenges, Reagon's analysis enriches contemporary democratic theory. But what would it mean to refuse Reagon's demand that we "not confuse" home and coalition? What if we complicate the very idea of "home"?"

"We learn through doing. Bernice Johnson Reagon has said we're stumbling because we have to take the next step."

"Full inclusion requires us to root out all the ways in which we have been tricked into collusion with the oppression of others, and all of us have. It requires us to move beyond our comfort zones. I once heard Bernice Reagon say that being in coalition meant working with people we didn't much like, and we might need to vomit over it for a while, but we had to do it anyway."

"There are a lot of young people that came out of SNCC, and not just came out of SNCC, but people who came down in to work in the Freedom Summer and spread out into the country — Mario Savio, right? — people in a lot of the different movements in the country. Bernice Reagon, who also came out of SNCC, and Sweet Honey in the Rock, that group of singers, all those were inspired by SNCC. And Bernice says the civil rights movement was the “borning movement,” right? It was — and SNCC was right at the heart of that borning movement."

"When my people were brought over here from Asia and Africa, they were given various names, such as Jones and Smith. I haven't adopted a name. It's a part of my ancestral background and heritage: I have re-established my original name. I have gone back to my own vine and fig tree."

"[In response to a comment ("I sometime-get the feeling that Jamal would rather crawl into the piano than off the bench at the conclusion of a performance, so deeply involved is he in his music") by critic Philip Elwood] Maybe so. But I regret that I still don't have enough time to spend with my instrument. I think I could become more at one with it if I did."

"It was 25 cents here, $6 there. At $6, one gets to thinking it's a lot of money. So then economics started dictating the direction of my career, and that's when I started devoting more time to jazz. When I got up to $60 a week, which was as much as my father was making, I said, well, this is it. And I was doing that before I left high school."

"Miles, Thad Jones, Clark Terry, Gil Evans, myself—the reason we always stay young is because we've been part of three eras. We heard Lunceford, Hines, Basie at their peak--I was a sponge, I absorbed that era. Then it was the Gillespie-Parker era—we were still young, and again we sponged it up. Now we are living in the electronic age . . . and we're still listening."

"A guy that knows all these electronic things may be great [...] but a guy who knows acoustic and electronic is better. Just like a guy who knows Mozart only may be great, but a guy who knows Mozart and Duke Ellington is better. And a guy who knows Mozart and Brahms and Ellington is even better . . . It's musical depth perception."

"If you're applying for credit and write that you’re an insurance salesman, or a member of the Chicago Symphony, you won't have trouble. But just write "jazz musician" and you can't even buy a sofa on credit."

"[On querying the permanent use of the word "jazz"] So was the word Negro ! Yet you hardly hear it anymore—it's now Afro-American or black. All sorts of linguistic changes are going on: Instead of chairman we now say chairperson in order to upgrade the position of women in our society. Jazz is an important-enough area of our culture to demand constant refinement."

"Years ago, when I was growing up and bands like Basie and Ellington came to the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh, where I was born, they were called entertainers. You can hardly use that word today, when men like Max Roach and Jackie McLean have tenure as professors at major American colleges."

"When 1 was 7, my mother arranged for me to take piano lessons. They cost one dollar a lesson. She was a domestic. She walked to work to save that dollar."

"Performing is like being the matador in a bullring. You have to be constantly concerned about what you're doing or you get gored."

"When I pass a piano anywhere, I have to touch it or play it."

""I do things differently," he asserts. "I put it down to my parents, and to being raised in Pittsburgh, which is unique. I was delivering papers to Billy Strayhorn's family when I was seven years old. It was Mary Lou Williams's town, Kenny Clarke's, Art Blakey's, Earl Hines's, Roy Eldridge's, George Benson's, Stanley Turrentine's, Earle Wilde [sic], the exponent of Liszt, Maxine Sullivan, Loren Mazel [sic] the conductor. My father was an open-hearth worker in the steel mills, but they got me playing the piano when I was three years old."

"I was playing Liszt's Eroica etudes when I was 11 . . . though I can't play it now." (Jamal reflects on this with a laugh.) "It all made me eventually settle on calling this great music 'American classical music' instead of jazz. It's the only art form that developed in the United States except for American Indian art. It managed to survive because it's so strong and so natural and so pure."

"[Jazz and the European classical repertoire] In Pittsburgh we didn't separate the two schools [...] We studied Bach and Ellington, Mozart and Art Tatum. When you start at 3, what you hear you play. I heard all these things."

"[When asked how he practiced] With the door open, hoping that someone would drive down my street in a big luxurious car and hear me! [...] I was never the practitioner in the sense of 12 hours a day, but I always thought about music. I think about music all the time."

"I once heard Ben Webster playing his heart out on a ballad [...] All of a sudden he stopped. I asked him, "Why did you stop, Ben?" He said, "I forgot the lyrics." That's what Nat (King) Cole was talking about, "You have learn to live with a song.""

"[Jazz] interpreted the works of composers such as the Gershwins or Irving Berlin beyond their wildest dreams. Take the pianist Art Tatum; most of the body of work he did wasn't his own music, and yet it was totally his. That's a process that has allowed what is called jazz to add so much to the world's culture. Look at the Juilliard School, the New England Conservatory, institutions that wouldn't have thought of teaching Louis Armstrong – now Louis Armstrong is teaching them, they all have jazz departments, and they teach kids from all over the world."

"I listened to music from Tatum and Erroll Garner to Mozart. I've composed since I was 10 years old – I used to do 20% my own pieces and 80% other people's; now it's turned the other way. After a certain time you discover the Mozart in you, the Duke Ellington or Billy Strayhorn in you. It takes time to discover yourself. You also have to find and keep players who are in tune with what you're doing; you have that empathy, the quality of breathing together."

"[On maintaining high levels of energy into old age] It's a divine gift, that's all I can tell you [...] We don't create, we discover – and the process of discovery gives you energy"

"I'm still evolving, whenever I sit down at the piano [...] I still come up with some fresh ideas."

"I always tried to divest myself of the music business. I wasn’t too thrilled with the music business at any time [...] So I have always sought to do other things."

"All my inspiration today," he [Miles Davis] asserts "comes from Ahmad Jamal, the Chicago pianist. I got the idea for this treatment of 'Autumn Leaves' from him."

"Listen to the way Jamal uses space. He lets it go so that you can feel the rhythm section and the rhythm section can feel you. It's not crowded ... Ahmad is one of my favorites. I live until he makes another record."

"Civil-Civility depicts the acts and writings of courageous women who I felt defied all odds to help women and humanity."

"The culture of suppressing women composers and performers goes centuries back in Germany and other countries."

"Well, I think it's time to get ready To realize just what I have found I have lived only half of what I am It's all clear to me now My heart is on fire My soul's like a wheel that's turnin' My love is alive My love is alive, yeah, girl, yeah"

"Ooh, dream weaver I believe you can get me through the night Ooh, dream weaver I believe we can reach the morning light"

"Fly me high through the starry skies Maybe to an astral plane Cross the highways of fantasy Help me to forget today's pain Ooh, dream weaver I believe you can get me through the night Ooh, dream weaver I believe we can reach the morning light Though the dawn may be coming soon There still may be some time Fly me away to the bright side of the moon Meet me on the other side"

"Salemina is so English! I can’t think how she manages. She is, in fact, more than English; she is British."

"Nothing .. can blot from my memory the profound, searching, and exhaustive analysis of a great nation which I learned in my small geography when I was a child, namely, " The French are a gay and polite people, fond of dancing and light wines."

"Aunt Celia is one of those persons who are born to command, and when they are thrown in contact with those who are born to be commanded all goes as merry as a marriage bell ; otherwise not."

"When you have wanted something very much, and didn’t know whether you would ever get it or not, and then all at once you find you have it, you almost wish it hadn’t come so soon!"

"Lord, I do not ask that Thou shouldst give me wealth; only show me where it is, and I will attend to the rest."

""She has a nice ladylike appearance, but when she takes her bonnet off she looks seventy years old.” “She ought to keep it off, then,” returned Francesca, “ for she looked eighty with it on."

"Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood.”"

"Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World,"

"The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles."

"She was fairly good at any kind of housework not demanding brains. (Chapter 20)"

""Mr. Popham is a Methodist and I'm a Congregationalist, but I say let the children go where they like, so I always take them with me." (Chapter 24)"

"When I was a little girl (I always think that these words, in precisely this juxtaposition, are six of the most charming in the language) -- when I was a little girl, I lived, between the ages of six and sixteen, in a small village in Maine."

"I knew him at once!—the smiling, genial, mobile face, rather highly colored, the brilliant eyes, the watch chain, the red carnation in the button-hole, and the expressive hands, much given to gesture."

"He had his literary weaknesses, Charles Dickens, but they were all dear, big, attractive ones, virtues grown a bit wild and rank. Somehow when you put him -- with his elemental humor, his inexhaustible vitality, his humanity, sympathy, and pity -- beside the Impeccables, he always looms large. Just for the moment, when the heart overpowers reason, he even makes the flawless ones look a little faded and colorless."

"People smile and tell me I'm the lucky one. And we've only just begun, Think I'm gonna have a son. He will be like she and me, as free as a dove, Conceived in love. Sun is gonna shine above.And even though we ain't got money, I'm so in love with you, honey. And everything will bring a chain of love. And in the morning, when I rise, You bring a tear of joy to my eyes, And tell me everything is gonna be alright."

"So help me if you can, I've got to get Back to the house at Pooh Corner by one. You'd be surprised, there's so much to be done. Count all the bees in the hive, Chase all the clouds from the sky Back to the days of Christopher Robin and Pooh."

"Your mama don't dance And your daddy don't rock and roll. Your mama don't dance And your daddy don't rock and roll. When evening rolls around And it's time to go to town, Where do you go To rock and roll?"

"I wanna sing you a love song. I wanna rock you in my arms all night long. I wanna get to know you. I wanna show you the peaceful feelin' of my home."

"Now I know my life has given me more than memories. Day by day We can see In every moment there's a reason to carry on.Sweet love's showing us a heavenly light, I've never seen such a beautiful sight. See love glowing on us every night. I know forever we'll be doing it."

"She had a place in his life, He never made her think twice. As he rises to her apology, Anybody else would surely know. He's watching her go.But what a fool believes He sees No wise man has the power To reason away. What seems to be Is always better than nothing, And nothing at all."

"You think that maybe it's over. Only if you want it to be. Are you gonna wait for a sign, your miracle? Stand up and fight.(This is it) Make no mistake where you are. (This is it) Your back's to the corner. (This is it) Don't be a fool anymore. (This is it) The waiting is over."

"So keep the fire burning tonight, See just what comes into sight. Don't take forever, Take it through the night. And believe the sun will rise with the dawn. That's all you need to go on. But for tonight, Just keep the fire burning bright."

"I'm alright, Nobody worry 'bout me. Why you got to gimme a fight? Can't you just let it be?I'm alright. Don't nobody worry 'bout me. You got to gimme a fight, Why don't you just let me be?"

"Live long enough, you're bound to find Moonshine'll make a man go blind. Never can tell what the brew will do, But there's times you wind up feelin' so fine. Some women seem to have a knack; They'll turn you on and leave you flat. Never can tell who's playin' for keeps So tell me what's holding you back I know your heart can take it."

"I'm like the rain 'Cause I like your thunder. I know we've learned to live together Here in the heartlight. Stand in the dark Oh, oh, and I'll light a candle And then we'll dance it in the moonlight Until the sunrise."

"Does anything last forever? I don't know Maybe we're near the end. (So darlin' tell me) So darlin', oh How can we go on together? Now that we've grown apart, oh no. Well, the only way to start Is heart to heart."

"Been working so hard, I'm punching my card. Eight hours, for what? Oh, tell me what I got. I've got this feeling That time's just holding me down. I'll hit the ceiling, Or else I'll tear up this town.So now I gotta cut loose, Footloose. Kick off the Sunday shoes. Please, Louise, Pull me off of my knees. Jack, get back, Come on before we crack. Lose your blues, Everybody cut footloose."

"(I'm free!) Heaven helps the man who fights his fear. Love's the only thing that keeps me here. (I'm free!) You're the reason that I'm hanging on. My heart's staying where my heart belongs. (I'm free!)"

"Revvin' up your engine, Listen to her howlin' roar. Metal under tension, Beggin' you to touch and go.Highway to the Danger Zone. Ride into the Danger Zone."

"Bodies working overtime, It's man against man. And all that ever matters is, baby, Who's ahead in the game. Funny, But it's always the same.Playing, Playing with the boys. Staying, Playing with the boys."

"If time has taught me anything You've got to learn to be the ball And I can't keep from laughing at it all Oh, I'm going nowI'm going all the way Sooner or later gotta love somebody I don't care how long it takes Like a shot to the heart I've got news for you I may not look so smart But I'm nobody's fool."

"Where are the dreams that we once had? This is the time to bring them back What were the promises Caught on the tips of our tongues? Do we forget or forgive? There's a whole other life Waiting to be lived when One day we're brave enough To talk with conviction of the heart."

"You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, A sigh is just a sigh; The fundamental things apply, As time goes by."

"Sunny Day Sweepin' the clouds away On my way to where the air is sweet Can you tell me how to get — How to get to Sesame Street?"

"I believe in little things that you can hardly see like honeycomb and spider webs and starfish in the sea. I believe in little things like icy drops of rain that melt into the morning mist when winds are warm again."

"I believe in little things Like you and me And just how big Little things can be"

"Come and knock on our door We've been waiting for you Where the kisses are hers and hers and his Three's company, too."

"Let martial note in triumph float And liberty extend its mighty hand A flag appears 'mid thunderous cheers, The banner of the Western land. The emblem of the brave and true Its folds protect no tyrant crew; The red and white and starry blue Is freedom's shield and hope."

"Hurrah for the flag of the free! May it wave as our standard forever, The gem of the land and the sea, The banner of the right. Let tyrants remember the day When our fathers with mighty endeavor Proclaimed as they marched to the fray That by their might and by their right It waves forever."

"The works and prayers of centuries Have brought us to this day... What shall be our legacy? What will our children say?... Let me know in my heart, When my days are through, America, America, I gave my best to you."

"Seventy-five percent of everything done throughout your life is the result of habit. Think of it! The way you walk, the way you eat, the clothes you wear, the places you go and...last, but not least, the way you play your accordion."

"Being a complete instrument in itself it has no equal as an entertainment medium in the home, outdoors, or wherever people gather to enjoy good fellowship. During the past 15 years or so the accordion has risen to the top of the field as a best seller in the musical instrument market. At present, it threatens to replace the piano as the medium through which Junior or little sister are initiated to the delights and sometimes pains of a musical education."

"The basic principles of all jazz styles are the same. Good musical taste, technical skill, and a firm grasp of the principles of chord construction and chord progression make up the sum total."

"The accordion fun? ....Sometimes. Not all the time. I find that it can be a frustrating instrument. The coordination involved is extraordinary and sometimes that coordination doesn't happen.... The use of the left hand and at the same time getting the dynamic range, the volume, is quite difficult. Other times it is fun if you're working with other musicians and you're doin' pieces that you really enjoy. It can really be fun!"

"The difficulties, of course, if you take an orchestral work you want to try to get as much of that composition, harmonically, and contrapuntally, that you possibly can. Many times that's impossible. It depends upon the texture of the music. And there are certain solo things that simply do not lend themselves to the accordion, such as Chopin. The ballads would be next to impossible to really do successfully...The accordion is allied to organ-texture, for instance, a Bach Prelude."

"The buttons on the standard instrument are a combination of single bass notes and sets of chords - major, minor, dominant seventh, and diminished...Yes (in all keys). And you can form other chords using more than one button; you don't have to just stay with one button. So you can play the root of the chord, with a single bass note, and then the chord coupled with that. So you get a considerable amount of sonority that way."

"There are instruments known as free-bass instruments, or sometimes called the bassetti, where you have totally complete single pitches, simply like you would in the right hand, and you form your own chords. And you have a greater range in the left hand, some three to four-and-a-half octaves."

"Since the accordion has so many attributes that are conducive to chamber music, it is particularly suitable for this medium of expression. In essence, the accordion has all of the prerequisites essential to small ensemble involvement: sustaining power, dynamic sensitivity, articulated response, timbre, and texture variance, and compatibility of sound with string and wind instruments."

"At present...I feel that my works require a modified serial technique, but it is a very unorthodox one, and almost never strictly adhered to throughout a given work. Neither does it destroy all tonal feeling...I do not mean tonality, but I do stress a progressive direction from one "note" center to another...(twelve-tone music) seems to be overly static without providing that experience of forward or backward movement that is an essential part of our musical art."

"I don’t understand any music! I feel it. I want them to feel something! I don’t want them to understand it. If I wanted them to understand exactly what I meant, I can write an essay! I’ve written a lot of speeches and essays and articles and everything else, but I don’t want that! I don’t want a particular thing; I want them to let themselves go and feel something they’ve never felt before. That’s all. That’s what a concert is — not a pleasurable experience; it is an experience of life-changing dimensions!"

"I have one idea about this whole interpretation problem as it relates to orchestral music — too many of our conductors start with old music. What they should do is interpret the music of our time and then go backwards. They would be much better off because if you interpret a contemporary work, where the composer is still alive and have contact with the compositional mind, you will also play older music as looked at from the perspective of the composer, instead of an interpretive kind of idea. I hate the performer that says, “Did you ever hear my Beethoven?” I don’t want to hear his Beethoven! I want to hear Beethoven."

"To me, the wonderful thing about music is a love affair between the performer and the composer, and between the composer and his audience. This love affair is a tripartite thing."

"Too much emphasis is placed upon the technical aspect of contemporary music and not enough on its communicative and aesthetic impact. This is where i strongly disagree with many of my colleagues. I firmly believe that a composer should have all contemporary techniques in his immediate grasp, and must be able to use these as they suit his purposes."

"Music is like this portal into another world – the world of truth."

"Despite protestations that he’s not into playing solos, Anastasio is, in fact, a certified guitar hero, one who succeeds at filling arenas and festival lawns with jam-band aficionados who greet Mixolydian licks with screams of glee. In the process, he has turned a whole generation of listeners onto the ecstasy that is available to those who know how to play really well and simply to wail with focused purpose."

"For many listeners and admirers, Hall's burnished tone and understated approach connote the sonic equivelant of watercolors, haiku, or gentle poetic lyrics. Known as much for the notes he doesn't play, Hall is a complete original. That delicate, sensitive style, with its exquisite note choices, introspective moods, and disciplined restraint, has been his calling card and lasting legacy as generations of ostentatious technicians have come and gone through the turn of history."

"A harmonically advanced cool-toned and subtle guitarist, Jim Hall was an inspiration to many guitarists, including some (such as Bill Frisell) who sound nothing like him."

"Seemingly allergic to pentatonic scales and harboring an aggressively defiant swagger, Filipino-American indie hero Joey Santiago broke in with the Pixies in the late '80s. As originators of the loud/quiet/loud dynamic that would be perpetually mimicked in the '90s, Santiago and the Pixies should be considered true precursors to grunge."

"My advice for creating instrumental music would depend on what kind of tune you are making. Having a strong melody is a good starting point. If you find something that sounds nice, put all of your heart and soul into it. Try to do something that makes it unique to you. Think creatively. I try to make each of my songs special in its own way. I like to have different moods and flavors in one song. I never got off on having every song sound the same, with only one type of energy. Really, anything creative and different is cool."

"Like Joni [Mitchell], Fahey explored a vast array of tunings in his career, and this embrace of new approaches provided the backbone for this whole school of playing. If you have to choose one essential Fahey tuning, look for his particular open C, tuned low to high as CGCGCE."

"Let tyrants shake their iron rod, And Slav'ry clank her galling chains, We fear them not, we trust in God, New England's God forever reigns."

"I wish I was in de land ob cotton, Old times dar am not forgotten; Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land! In Dixie Land whar I was born in, Early on one frosty mornin', Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land! Den I wish I was in Dixie! Hooray! Hooray! In Dixie's Land we'll take our stand, to lib an' die in Dixie. Away! away! away down South in Dixie. Away! away! away down South in Dixie."

"The Union forever, hurrah! boys, hurrah! Down with the traitors, up with the stars; While we rally round the flag, boys, we rally once again, Shouting the battle cry of freedom!"

"We will welcome to our numbers the loyal, true and brave, Shouting the battle cry of freedom! And although he may be poor, he shall never be a slave, Shouting the battle cry of freedom!"

"When Johnny comes marching home again, Hurrah, hurrah, We'll give him a hearty welcome then, Hurrah, hurrah; The men will cheer, the boys will shout, The ladies, they will all turn out, And we'll all feel gay, When Johnny comes marching home."

"One can hardly skim a music magazine without seeing mention made of Mr Rudess. He has achieved fame as a keyboard virtuoso, a feat that seems almost impossible in a post-punk world.Yet the man’s skills are undeniable. He studied classical piano at Julliard at the age of nine before becoming enamoured of the synthesizer as a teenager. His first solo album earned him a Best New Talent award in a Keyboard magazine poll before he joined up with the Dixie Dregs and Dream Theater, with whom he still plays."

"In the Big Rock Candy Mountains There's a land that's fair and bright Where the handouts grow on bushes And you sleep out every night Where the boxcars all are empty And the sun shines every day On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings In the Big Rock Candy Mountains."

"In the Big Rock Candy Mountains All the cops have wooden legs And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs."

"I'm a-goin' to stay where you sleep all day Where they hung the Turk that invented work In the Big Rock Candy Mountains."

"The speed and aggression [in Slayer's music] came from Hanneman’s love for hardcore punk such as Minor Threat, TSOL, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, the Germs and more. This influence had an impact on [the band's] primitive sound which was the blueprint for all thrash metal bands to follow. Hanneman played and wrote music on every single Slayer album and is responsible for so many classic hits."

"It’s fun to watch these guys live and see their virtually identical soloing styles. Jeff Hanneman, with atonal runs going up and down the neck, finished with a whammy bar dump! Kerry King, with atonal runs going up and down the neck, finished with a whammy bar dump! These guys were made to be in a band together – because they would sound terrible in any other band."

"Even though [Hanneman] was at the heart of the [Slayer's] creative force musically and lyrically, he shed away from the public eye mostly and usually avoided interviews, leaving the talking to Kerry King of Tom Araya."

"I'm a Yankee Doodle dandy, A Yankee Doodle do or die; A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam's Born on the Fourth of July."

"I'm no cranky hanky panky, I'm a dead square honest Yankee And I'm mighty proud of that old flag that flies for Uncle Sam Though I don't believe in raving, ev'ry time I see it waving There's a chill runs up my back that makes me glad I'm what I am."

"When I was growing up people would always say, and it was meant in the kindest possible way, ‘You’re really good for a girl,’ because there weren’t a lot of girls or women playing. Out of this small pond of people, it was surprising to them. In my opinion, you’d have to be pretty unworldly to make a comment like that anymore. Nobody had the success that Alison Krauss had. So, when that happened, I think it started to make it difficult for people to look at women in bluegrass as some kind of exceptional thing. Here was a woman who really blew out the boundaries for the music and really expanded the potential for the music and brought in new listeners."

"A kiss on the hand may be quite Continental, But diamonds are a girl's best friend."

"Men grow cold as girls grow old And we all lose our dreams in the end, But square-cut or pear-shaped, These rocks don't lose their shape: Diamonds are a girl's best friend."

"In its post-World War II heyday, bebop was known as much for its precarious lifestyle as for musical daring. Generated in no small part by the aura surrounding the mythic, self-destructive Charlie Parker, drug addiction became an occupational hazard among aspiring jazz players. But amid this chronicle of disaster, Clifford Brown presented a shining alternative. The most brilliant young trumpeter of his generation, he was completely drug-free, a model both as musician and man – disciplined and good-natured. Thus it seemed a particularly cruel trick of fate that, in 1956, he died in a car accident, aged just 25. Though he had only been recording for four years, Brown left a considerable legacy on disc. He enlivened every session with his bright sound, impeccable facility and, above all, the sense that everything he played was driven by delight, an insatiable urge to say something new in each solo. Sheer fluency is perhaps his most striking quality, carried along by a rich tone, and an attack as crisp, intelligent and varied as the buoyant logic that informed his improvisations."

"What makes jazz ‘jazz’ today? Improvisation, blues and swing, passionate individuality – the music may hark back to its classic qualities, but today’s scene has splintered into a plethora of postmodern fragments, from which every player has to construct a distinctive voice. No one has met this challenge with more imagination than trumpeter Dave Douglas. In fact, he has mixed feelings about what he calls ‘this beast called jazz’: though he’s always wanted to play it, he wants to incorporate all the other aspects of music and life that compel him, too. In 2003 he celebrated his 40th birthday with a concert given by ten different groups he has led, including the Tiny Bell trio, with guitar and drums (inspired by Balkan music); Charms of the Night Sky (a chamber group with accordion); a sextet devoted to works by neglected jazz masters; and a quintet with cello and violin whose repertoire includes Douglas originals, Webern and Stravinsky. What unites all these ensembles is Douglas’s virtuoso ability, and his protean skills as a composer."

"Dizzy Gillespie’s old friend, bassist Milt Hinton, used to say, ‘Chords are our love, but rhythm is our business,’ and that might have been Diz’s lifelong motto as well. Whether the group was large or small, the groove headlong swing or sizzling Afro-Cuban, a Gillespie band lifted you out of your seat with its sheer musical energy. And the crest of that wave was the leader’s fiery trumpet, which had revolutionised jazz brass in the ’40s. The young Gillespie could play higher and faster for longer than anybody before him, and his passionate, coruscating solos define the brave new world of bebop. Just as radical were his harmonies and rhythms – fusillades of notes tumbling over bar-lines, defying conventional chord structures. And this was not mere ‘subversion’, but a well-conceived creative strategy. Despite his madcap reputation, Dizzy Gillespie was one of the prime theoreticians of bop and a tireless teacher, demonstrating, encouraging, inspiring."

"Critics like to describe certain records as ‘seminal’ and, in several ways, Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder actually was. It marked a return to form for the erstwhile trumpet prodigy, whose career had gone adrift due to drugs. In 1963, still only 25, he was already a veteran of the Dizzy Gillespie band – which he had joined at 18 – and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. The epitome of the bravura energy and bluesy drive of hard bop, Morgan was renowned for his cocky assurance, flashing technique and love of playing. He attacked solos with a boyish zest, as if he couldn’t wait to tell you everything he was feeling and show you what he could do. His blend of funk, fire and fun – plus a knack for adventurous phrasing – gave an exuberant edge to all five tracks on The Sidewinder. But the surprise was its title tune, a sinuous blues line with an infectious, hip-swinging beat which caught the ear of the public. Morgan and his record company, Blue Note, had a huge Top 40 hit on their hands, with consequences they could not have predicted. Having tasted commercial success, the trumpeter, though passionate about his art, felt his subsequent albums needed a groovy, R‘n’B-style hook. And Blue Note, a small label proud of its independence, found it couldn’t meet the demand for The Sidewinder. So it joined forces with a larger firm, and gradually moved away from its pure-jazz ethos into the twilight zone of fusion and crossover. But, as the 1960s wore on, that was clearly where jazz was headed. The Sidewinder inspired countless dumbed-down imitations, without the original’s subtle flair. Ironically, Lee Morgan fiercely opposed the trend he was thought to have started, insisting on the vital depth of jazz, which he pursued in his own playing. But his career and life were savagely ended when he was shot at a club by a jealous woman in 1972. It’s a sad and curious tale, but what remains is Lee Morgan’s achievement, not least in The Sidewinder itself. Freed from its cultural context, it retains all its ebullience, energy and charm and its famous title tune is an abiding delight. The disc’s real distinction, like that of Lee Morgan himself, is a timeless creativity."

"Stanley Clarke has seemingly done it all and then some during his exceptional career as a bassist. Perhaps most noted for his jazz playing, Clarke also shined on the rock side, notably in the late 1970s with Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards in the New Barbarians. Clarke, known for playing his instrument more like an upright bass, has the almost uncanny ability to give his guitar an almost percussive sound."

"While Stanley Clarke is both a master of the double bass and electric bass, and a dynamic visionary on both instruments, he's also an accomplished composer, as evidenced by many of his solo discs, the groove-heave 1976 release, School Days, as well as his film scores. Clarke is clearly a master of jazz-rock fusion, especially during his time with Return to Forever, but he can lay down a funk groove like no other, and he swings like a madman."

"An integral part of Ornette Coleman's early groups, Charlie Haden played an important role in the development of free jazz, while also being an extremely competent and intuitive player. While his playing and writing with the large ensemble Liberation Music Orchestra, as well as his output with Keith Jarrett's group is stellar, his duo recordings are great, as well, namely Beyond the Missouri Sky with guitarist Pat Metheny and Nightfall with pianist John Taylor."

"Louis and Bebe Barron [...] developed the ‘tonalities’ — the accompaniment of interstellar gulps and burbles — that take the place of a musical score."

"Some folks thought Rahsaan Roland Kirk's playing multiple horns at once was a gimmick. Granted, the guy looked like a madman with all sorts of woodwinds strapped around him, with maybe a tenor sax or manzello and stritch (both obscure saxophones) in his mouth at the same time, but Kirk was a hell of an improviser, often harmonizing with himself. There's a live recording of Kirk playing "Sentimental Journey" on one horn and Dvorak's "New World Symphony" on the other, and Kirk said it's splitting the mind into two parts. "It's like making one part of your mind say, 'Ob-la-di' and make the other part of your mind say 'What does it mean'?" Not only was Kirk a damn fine saxophonist but his flute playing, while scatting, heavily influenced Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull."

"Wayne Shorter, who turns eighty this month, and Sonny Rollins are two of the finest saxophonists living today."

"Dave Brubeck was incredibly well known for most of his career. His early success with college audiences – the Brubeck Quartet virtually invented the campus circuit – catapulted him on to the cover of Time magazine in 1954. In 1960 his star status increased with the album Time Out. Brubeck’s mixture of asymmetrical rhythms and catchy tunes won international renown, though the disc’s biggest hit, the sinuous ‘Take Five’, was written by the quartet’s alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, with some structural advice from his boss. But, as all too often in jazz, popular celebrity inspired critical condescension. He was slated for his ‘academic’ approach – he had studied with Darius Milhaud, classical composer and member of the French collective Les Six – his use of such classical devices as counterpoint and polytonality, his sometimes thunderous keyboard attack and disinclination to swing in a conventional manner. Critics damned his lyricism with faint praise and dismissed him from the jazz tradition. However, over the years, as the idea of a monolithic tradition has become suspect, Brubeck has come to be seen as a remarkable, original talent. Far from being some kind of uptight academic, he had trouble reading music and was one of the most purely intuitive pianists jazz has produced. His style was founded completely on a commitment to musical expression, fuelled by a belief that, as he once put it, ‘jazz should have the right to take big chances’ – even going beyond what has been considered jazz."

"The dead they sleep a long, long sleep; The dead they rest, and their rest is deep; The dead have peace, but the living weep."

"Four of us together dwell— Two from Heaven and two from Hell; Four of us under the selfsame sky— Love and Death and a Dream and I."

"When trouble drives me into rhyme, Which is two-thirds of all the time, What peace a thought like this can give— Great is the age in which we live!"

"Oh, how various is the scene Allowed to Man for his demesne!"

"When you’re away, I’m restless, lonely, Wretched, bored, dejected; only Here’s the rub, my darling dear, I feel the same when you are here."

"You buy some flowers for your table; You tend them tenderly as you’re able; You fetch them water from hither and thither— What thanks do you get for it all? They wither."

"When the wind is in the tree, It makes a noise just like the sea, As if there were not noise enough To bother one, without that stuff."

"Loyal be to loyal friends; Make them pay you dividends; Work, like the industrious bee, Your friends and foes impartially."

"Some folks I know are always worried, That when they die, they will be buried; And some I know are quite elated Because they’re going to be cremated."

"I’d rather listen to a flute In Gotham, than a band in Butte."

"The apple grows so bright and high, And ends its days in apple pie."

"Of all the birds that sing and fly Between the housetops and the sky, The muddy sparrow, mean and small, I like, by far, the best of all."

"I play with the bulls and the bears; I’m the Bartlett of market quotations."

"The stars, like measles, fade at last."

"Babies haven’t any hair; Old men’s heads are just as bare;— Between the cradle and the grave Lies a haircut and a shave."

"The head that wears a crown may be Inclined to some anxiety, But, on the other hand, I know A derby domes its meed of woe."

"I burned my candle at both ends, And now have neither foes nor friends."

"Breathes there a man with hide so tough Who says two sexes aren’t enough?"

"If you love me, as I love you, We'll both be friendly and untrue."

"Your little voice, So soft and kind; Your little soul, Your little mind!"

"The countless cousins of the Czar, Grand Duke or Duchess, every one, As multitudinous as are The spheres (who borrow from the sun)."

"Blessings love disguise."

"My soul is dark with stormy riot, Directly traceable to diet."

"Which six of the seven cities that claimed Homer were liars?"

"Little by little we subtract Faith and Fallacy from Fact, The Illusory from the True, And starve upon the Residue."

"To You, oh, Goddess of Efficiency, Your happy vassals bend the reverent knee, Save when arthritis, your benighted foe, Sulks in the bones and sourly mumbles "No!""

"To all the starry host of Heaven they cried, But had no radio and of course they died."

"Smelling like a municipal budget."

"The heart’s dead Are never buried."

"My music springs from the soil of the American midwest. It is music of the plains rather than of the city and reflects, I believe, something of the broad prairies of my native Nebraska.""

"As a music theorist, I have always contended that the historical approach to music theory is not enough. The modern theorist should, of course, be able to analyze the music of the masters, to explain (as much as possible) the sources of their musical language. They should also, however, be able to suggest new paths, new theories, including those that break with creative and scholarly tradition....This attitude has puzzled some of my academic colleagues, since I am in my own composition essentially a traditionalist. I do not believe that this is a contradiction or an inconsistency."

"In music, the great essential after creation itself is communication through performance...it is of immediate and primary importance to the creator. For the composer, if he is to develop, must hear his own works. An orchestra composer without an orchestra is like a scientist without his laboratory or a dramatist without his stage or actors."

"The artistic contribution of any nation and any age must be in terms of creation. Performers, symphony organizations, opera houses, museums, libraries - important as they are - are not enough. The arts, if they are to live, must be living arts."

"The most complete knowledge of tonal material cannot create a composer any more than the memorizing of Webster's dictionary can produce a dramatist or poet. Music is, or should be, a means of communication, a vehicle for the expression of the inspiration of the composer. Without that inspiration, without the need to communicate, without— in other words— the creative spirit itself, the greatest knowledge will avail nothing."

"To the artist, to the musician, is given the task of creating and expressing beauty--of sensitizing the souls of men."

"Being curious is an absolute rule of life. If you don’t have that, I don’t know what you're doing in this music."

"Even while I was studying at [Manhattan School of Music], I was learning about melody and rhythm, and theory, and harmony, and all the great composers like Scriabin, Khatchaturian, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev...Bach and Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Schoenberg, Alan Berg...Boulez, Stockhausen...We would listen, for example, to Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, or a Bach Cantata or the Prelude and Fugue, and so on. And then the teacher, Ludmila Ulehla, picked the essential 20 composers in music history, from...Mozart...and so on, up through...Debussy, Scriabin...and Stockhousen...Eventually, my goal became to put all that I had absorbed from these studies into jazz, into, say, "Stella By Starlight," to integrate the harmony, the melodic ideas, and so on. I continued doing that for about twenty years afterwards. I spent hours and hours at the piano, sleeping as little [as] three hours a night. But I loved it, so it wasn't arduous work."

"You must remember that it was a different time...It was before everyone was looking into their smartphones. There were computers but it wasn't such a dominant vibe in the air. People talked to each other, met in bars, and went out to hear music...In Greenwich Village...there were at least six clubs within a few walking minutes...Around that time there were at least 10 functioning clubs just in Manhattan, not even counting Brooklyn, that featured music seven nights a week...People would go out to the the clubs, not just musicians. There was a real sense of community...We were very lucky to live in this time."

"Very often the things that we consider to be new are not new. They're just new combinations or reanimations and reimaginations of things that have already been done, put together in a different way."

"Comin' in on a wing and a pray'r Comin' in on a wing and a pray'r Tho' there's one motor gone, We can still carry on, Comin' in on a wing and a pray'r. What a show what a fight Yes, we really hit our target for tonight How we sing as we limp thru the air Look below, there's our field over there With our full crew aboard And our trust in the Lord We're comin' in on a wing and a pray'r."