Top 100 Elvis Costello Quotes
#1. I find it to be the ultimate backhanded compliment when you are compared against yourself.
Elvis Costello
#2. And I'm up while the dawn is breaking, even though my heart is aching. I should be drinking a toast to absent friends instead of these comedians.
Elvis Costello
#3. You need a platform upon which to release an orchestral record, otherwise it's just going to be an obscurity.
Elvis Costello
#4. Clowntime is over Time to take cover While others just talk and talk Somebody's watching where the others don't walk.
Elvis Costello
#6. I'm a man with a mission in two or three editions And I'm giving you a longing look Everyday, everyday, everyday I write the book.
Elvis Costello
#7. My family calls me Declan. But most people call me E.C. I think it comes from my dad. It's an Irish convention. You usually call the first child by the initials.
Elvis Costello
#8. It's a breath you took too late.
It's a death that's worse than fate.
Elvis Costello
#10. Obviously the people that I admired, like the Beatles, were really into rock'n'roll, but it was already a little past rock'n'roll when I started listening and making my own choices about music.
Elvis Costello
#11. Don't get smart or sarcastic
He snaps back just like elastic
Spare us the theatrics and the verbal gymnastics
We break wise guys just like matchsticks
Elvis Costello
#12. They say you better listen to the voice of reason But they don't give you any choice 'cause they think that it's treason. So you had better do as you are told. You better listen to the radio.
Elvis Costello
#13. You've got a chemistry class; I want a piece of your mind;
You don't know what you started when you mixed it up with mine ...
Elvis Costello
#14. It's a petty thing, but I wouldn't join the Scouts when I was a kid, 'cause you had to swear allegiance to the queen. I'm just not a royalist. I think it's idiotic, a hereditary principle.
Elvis Costello
#15. Oh, I know that she's disgusted,
cause she's feeling so abused.
She gets tired of the lust,
but it's so hard to refuse.
Elvis Costello
#17. For all the courage that we never had, I'm just about glad.
Elvis Costello
#18. Some people can't physically hear things. A kid that listens to Metallica or something can't hear that, because he's filled himself up with this stuff, he physically can't hear a banjo or a harp or something.
Elvis Costello
#19. The way you look I understand how you were not impressed, but I heard you let that little friend of mine take off your party dress.
Elvis Costello
#20. Well, I've had a lot of different experiences in music over the years. And not everything you do can satisfy everybody's idealised version of you.
Elvis Costello
#21. I've never felt British. I'm just not interested in national identity. I don't know why.
Elvis Costello
#22. It's the stupid details that my heart is breaking for.
Elvis Costello
#24. S you check your effects, check your reflection,
I'm so affected in the face of your affection
Elvis Costello
#25. There are five things to write songs about: I'm leaving you. You're leaving me. I want you. You don't want me. I believe in something. Five subjects, and 12 notes. For all that, we musicians do pretty well.
Elvis Costello
#26. It's a dangerous game that comedy plays. Sometimes it tells you the truth; sometimes it delays it.
Elvis Costello
#27. I could promise that I'll always be true to you, but we may not live to be so old.
Elvis Costello
#29. Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.
Elvis Costello
#31. The only two things that motivate me and that matter to me are revenge
and guilt.
Elvis Costello
#33. There are a few things that I regret, but nothing that I need to forget.
Elvis Costello
#34. I've never had any real concern about posterity. I hope some people will be sorry when I'm not here, but I'm not playing for that.
Elvis Costello
#36. You can't live in the past, and I don't. I'm not nostalgic about my own work at all.
Elvis Costello
#37. I mistrust these people in music industry who can be everybody. This is where technology dictates to them. I mistrust that, that in somehow the chips capture the soul of a player, that's patent nonsense.
Elvis Costello
#38. So don't try to touch my heart, it's darker than you think
And don't try to read my mind because it's full of disappearing ink
Elvis Costello
#39. The truth can't hurt you, it's just like the dark. It scares you witless but with time you see things clear and stark
Elvis Costello
#40. You do have to be a bit careful with your voice. It is an instrument.
Elvis Costello
#41. There are some things you can't cover up with lipstick and powder.
Elvis Costello
#42. It's what's on the record not what labels on it. You know, that's like getting a box of cornflakes and eating the cardboard.
Elvis Costello
#43. Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking, when I hear the silly things that you say.
Elvis Costello
#44. As I walk through This wicked world Searchin' for light in the darkness of insanity, I ask myself Is all hope lost? Is there only pain and hatred, and misery? And each time I feel like this inside, There's one thing I wanna know: What's so funny 'bout Peace, Love, & Understanding?
Elvis Costello
#45. When you're working with the same band you kind of know their style inside out, and even when you've been working for seven years with the same people, suddenly they'll do something you didn't even think they were capable of.
Elvis Costello
#46. Though the passion still flutters and flickers, it never got into our knickers.
Elvis Costello
#47. I started with rock n' roll and ... then you start to take it apart like a child with a toy and you see there's blues and there's country ... Then you go back from country into American music ... and you end up in Scotland and Ireland eventually.
Elvis Costello
#50. He's such a drag
He's not insane
It's just that everybody
Has to feel his pain.
Elvis Costello
#51. She said she was working for the ABC news, it was as much of the alphabet as she knew how to use.
Elvis Costello
#52. I really thought twice about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when that came in. I always was of a mind that it's an inherently stupid idea to put something like that in a glass case.
Elvis Costello
#54. And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.
Elvis Costello
#55. But if I've done something wrong there's no "ifs" and "buts"
Cause I love you just as much as I hate your guts
Elvis Costello
#56. [Commercial] radio is absolutely the enemy of music. They are my sworn and mortal enemy, and I will have nothing to do with them.
Elvis Costello
#57. My dad had a steady job with a really major dance band from '54 till '68, and then quit because he wanted to play different music. He wanted to sing about peace. He believed in these things.
Elvis Costello
#58. History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats.
Elvis Costello
#59. I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.
Elvis Costello
#60. I've had an unusual life. A life far removed from most people's experience.
Elvis Costello
#61. What do we care, if the world is a joke? We'll give it a big kiss, we'll give it a poke. Death wears a big hat cause he's a big bloke.
Elvis Costello
#62. Don't tell me you don't know what love is When you're old enough to know better.
Elvis Costello
#63. Sometimes I wonder if we're livin' in the same land.
Why do you wanna be my friend
when I feel like a juggler
running out of hands?
Elvis Costello
#64. Cause somewhere in the Quizling Clinic, there's a shorthand typist taking seconds over minutes.
Elvis Costello
#65. The long arm of the law slides up the outskirts of town.
Elvis Costello
#66. I'm not going to get too sentimental, like those other sticker valentines, 'cause I don't know if you are loving some body. I only know it isn't mine.
Elvis Costello
#67. I'd been to Memphis before, but we stayed out of Memphis early on in the late 70s for obvious reasons. People were very sensitive about Elvis Presley, and my stage name obviously would be provocative to some people in that area at that time.
Elvis Costello
#68. You must hold on to the sort of finger-painting aspect of music. That's something I learned, particularly from listening to Neil Young. Tom Waits is another one, because Tom's music is incredibly sophisticated and beautifully arranged, but he's using a toolbox that's unlike anybody else's.
Elvis Costello
#70. I get very frustrated by this term 'genre exercise.' I mean, what exactly is that? Genre is not really relevant when you are writing a song; hopefully you are doing it to explore something, to create something, and I don't agree that any of my albums are genre exercises.
Elvis Costello
#71. But it's easier to say 'I love you',
than 'Yours, sincerely' I suppose.
Elvis Costello
#72. I think when I was younger I was not very good at writing love songs that didn't have a twist.
Elvis Costello
#73. Don't start me talking
I could talk all night
My mind goes sleepwalking
While I'm putting the world to right.
Elvis Costello
#75. I'm drawing from two generations back how to think about music, how to think about why you travel to make music, what the possible pitfalls of that are for the way your life is structured. The good and bad of all of it get into the mix of what's created, what you're creating.
Elvis Costello
#76. Can a mere song change a people's minds? I doubt that it is so. But a song can infiltrate your heart and the heart may change your mind.
Elvis Costello
#78. Obviously I got known for some other songs early on, and some of those were rock'n'roll songs. Some of them were melodic pop songs. And I've done lots of different things, as you know, but every so often I get drawn back.
Elvis Costello
#79. Then I became an altar boy because of the solemn face, but I got thrown out at fourteen for laughing, because the priest used to mumble everything except the church plate takings.
Elvis Costello
#80. Certain songs have been written years apart, but they have a natural continuity to my mind.
Elvis Costello
#81. I can write orchestrations, but I can't sight-read music and play at the same time. I don't have enough facility.
Elvis Costello
#82. I know that when I make a record like The Delivery Man as a contrast to even Il Sogno, this is going to reach a wider audience, because it communicates in that very direct way.
Elvis Costello
#83. I'm not even sure what I want, but that's not the point - it's that I want it now.
Elvis Costello
#84. Well there's a line that you must toe and it'll soon be time to go but it's darker than you know in those Complicated Shadows
Elvis Costello
#85. When they finally put you in the ground, I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down.
Elvis Costello
#86. People speak with enormous pomposity and arrogance about music.
Elvis Costello
#87. Really the only thing holding a lot of records together is the personality of the singer, and the will to write all of these different things.
Elvis Costello
#89. I don't think I was ever particularly mean. I can certainly think of some idiotic exchanges I've had. I was accused of destroying pop music, like Wagner destroyed opera - a guy in Germany started ranting that at me.
Elvis Costello
#90. It's what I do. I don't deserve any awards for this, it's just music. It's just writing songs. You sit down, you write a song, you record it. You tour and play the songs live, dress them up a bit differently, or dress them down.
Elvis Costello
#91. I've been lucky to listen to lots of different types of music.
Elvis Costello
#92. There was not a lot of rock n' roll in the house. Our parents didn't think it was very groovy, and I tend to agree with them. If you grew up with Charlie Parker, Bill Haley wasn't very hip.
Elvis Costello
#93. Maybe I just never learned my harmony part, because what everybody says sounds odd to them sounds perfectly natural to me.
Elvis Costello
#94. You swore you wouldn't shout. If it's not your punch, then it's your pout.
Elvis Costello
#95. So you take her to the pictures,
trying to become a fixture.
Inch by inch trying to reach her,
all the way through the second feature.
Worrying about your physical fitness,
tell me how you got this sickness?
Elvis Costello
#96. Even in a perfect world, where everyone was equal I'd still own the film rights and be working on the sequal
Elvis Costello
#97. He's got a mind like a sewer and a heart like a fridge.
Elvis Costello
#98. Don't wear your heart on your sleeve when your remarks are off the cuff.
Elvis Costello
#99. Happiness isn't a fortune in a cookie. It's deeper, wider, funnier, and more transporting than that.
Elvis Costello
#100. My ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant.
Elvis Costello
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