Top 100 Musician Quotes
#1. I like to call myself a 360-degree artist. I'm a musician, but I have other things I do, too.
Rita Ora
#2. If you are a musician and you don't show any interest on the business level then you are actually vulnerable and people will rip you off. They will sweet talk you into anything.
Michael Schenker
#4. I don't spend a lot of time thinking of what they'll do musically, I try to imagine being locked into a windowless room with this person for twelve hours at a time. If you can look at that and think it might be fun then maybe you've got the right musician.
Leo Kottke
#5. My life as a professional musician is a joyless exercise in futility.
Robert Fripp
#6. I didn't have that intense ambition to be a musician or an actress. I just enjoyed it. And by enjoying it, because I loved it, it enabled me to get better at what I was doing, because there was a love behind it.
Lauryn Hill
#7. If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.
Albert Einstein
#8. When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.
Rhys Ifans
#9. I'm a self-taught musician aside from what I've been able to pick up from other players.
Walter Becker
#10. I can feel my father's spirit within me. I can feel similarities within us from the artistic perspective from being a musician. We have a lot of similarities.
Ziggy Marley
#11. The only thing I wouldn't like to do is to play roles as a musician. I'm not sure that I would be comfortable doing that, and I'm not sure I'd be very good at it. I think I would be better served, and would be a better partner, if I was in something outside of myself.
Larry Mullen Jr.
#12. While I am not a musician, I love music. I have over 15,000 songs on my iPod. Everything from hard core rap to the soundtrack from the original 'Cinderella.'
Lee Daniels
#13. In some ways Lester Young is the most complex rhythmically of any musician. He does some things which are just phenomenal.
Lee Konitz
#14. I do everything I can to be the best actor I can be, the best musician I can be. I try to take risks; I try not to let fear run my life.
Robert David Hall
#15. Clarence once mentioned to me during a negotiation but he should be paid not only for playing but for being Clarence.
Bruce Springsteen
#16. A poet is a musician who can't sing. Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woeful small targets.
Patrick Rothfuss
#17. To put it in musician's terms, my chops are good.
Cy Coleman
#18. I'm so proud that my offspring became a musician. I'm full of awe that we are able to have a whole family live the life of artists.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#19. My dad is my biggest influence on me as a musician, even though he's not a musician.
Daron Malakian
#20. I used to try and make up visually for what I couldn't play as a musician. I used to get into very incredible visual things where, in order just to make one chord more lethal, I'd make it a really lethal looking thing, whereas really it's just going to be picked normally.
Pete Townshend
#21. The role of the musician is to go from concept to full execution. Put another way, it's to go from understanding the content of something to really learning how to communicate it and make sure it's well-received and lives in somebody else.
Yo-Yo Ma
#22. First, I think of myself as a brand, a businesswoman. Musician is something I just do because it's my passion - I love it and it's something I do for fun. I love music and I love to make people dance.
Paris Hilton
#23. How good are the best musical imaginations? Can a trained musician, swiftly reading a score, tell just how that voicing of dissonant oboes and flutes over the massed strings will sound?
Daniel Dennett
#24. While not a musician, my father was a music agent for years before becoming pop culture icon Famous Amos.
Shawn Amos
#25. I will not hide the fact that I love to hear the spectators react after a sacrifice of a piece or pawn. I don't think that there is anything bad in such a feeling; no artist or musician is indifferent to the reactions of the public.
Mikhail Tal
#26. I didn't finish high school, but I went to a special school for producers and musicians, a three year course for engineering, producing and learning all the tricks. So now I have my producing degree and certification.
Martin Garrix
#27. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the only musician who had as much knowledge asgenius, and as much genius as knowledge.
Gioachino Rossini
#28. If you are a musician who has released albums, it would perhaps be morbidly interesting to know how much you would be owed if everyone who now has your music had actually bought your record.
Henry Rollins
#29. The theatre is not the place for the musician. When the curtain is up the music interrupts the actor, and when it is down the music interrupts the audience.
Sir Arthur Sullivan
#31. Imagine Michael Jackson trying to play basketball or Michael Jordan trying to become a musician. They might not have been so successful if they would have chosen to do so. Regardless
Harshajyoti Das
#32. I am a member of the Muskogee people. I'm a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I'm looking for answers of some sort or the other.
Joy Harjo
#33. I'm a self-taught musician so how I read music is kind of very weak and I kind of read my own version of tablature, I write my own crappy reminders on what I'm playing.
Jason Mraz
#34. My father's nephew was the blues musician, Lowell Fulson. Every time he came around, he had a pretty car, a beautiful woman and a slick sharkskin suit. Believe it or not, that's how I decided I wanted to get into music.
Charlie Wilson
#36. It's funny, there aren't too many musicians that also moonlight as studio engineers. There's a few - the really brilliant ones.
Dave Grohl
#37. A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#38. Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.
T Bone Burnett
#39. Every musician, their goal in life is to play music that people love, and I've accomplished my goal. I was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and left that chapter of my life and those people in the past. Good and bad, I've loved and am thankful for that chapter.
Steven Adler
#41. I'm definitely musician and storyteller. But I always like to take an active role in things I care about socially and environmentally.
Ben Sollee
#42. No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.
Storm Jameson
#43. To be a drummer you also have to be a musician.
Ian Paice
#44. Adam Berenson knows how to compose, organize an ensemble, do musical research, play solo and trio piano, write for musical journals, and enlist others to his cause. A very fine musician.
Paul Bley
#45. I guess in this culture of ever-shortening attention spans, it's good if a song can lift us out of the madness, even if only for a few minutes.
Peter Bradley Adams
#46. I went to public school, and it shaped me as a musician.
Ruben Studdard
#47. The age of 18 seemed the right time to try something different in my life. Moving to the U.K. was a risk, and I was never confident that I could ever make a full-time living being a musician, but I had to try. Initially, I worked as a jazz musician in pubs or with bands.
Manfred Mann
#48. My father is a jazz musician, so I grew up hearing jazz. My parents loved it, but I didn't like it. It went on for too long. Yes, I had certain teachers that really inspired me, like Danny Barker, and John Longo. And I had no idea that I would have any impact on jazz.
Wynton Marsalis
#49. I love the power of the musician who composes and performs. I envy their ability to put a nugget of truth in three minutes of sweat and emotional outpouring, colored entirely from their thoughts.
Kim Harrison
#50. Being an artist and a musician, I have witnessed the previous generation taking the art form, not as a way of making a living, but as a belief, an almost maniacal, sometimes insane devotion and commitment to communication.
David Finckel
#51. Since my father is a musician as well, he taught me growing up that if you can play jazz, you can learn all instruments and write on them. He wanted me to be a songwriter that can do anything in any genre. I'm all about doing every genre.
Meghan Trainor
#52. The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm, nor the voice that echoes it.
Kahlil Gibran
#53. It's nearly redundant to enumerate the reasons The Beatles are important. There are probably different reasons why The Beatles are important to a musician like myself and to the millions of Beatles fans who just enjoy listening to the music.
Todd Rundgren
#54. My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.
Gyorgy Ligeti
#55. I've been a musician since childhood, and music is my first love. I love it.
Steven Seagal
#56. I wasn't making music consciously when I was younger. I was a musician, but that has its own stigmas. Anywhere on the planet, it's one of the more undervalued positions.
K'naan
#57. I realized that I wanted to get better in every way. As a person, as a friend, as a songwriter, as a musician, as an artist, record producer, you name it.
Kenny Chesney
#58. Many musicians will say they don't care about the money yet they must commit themselves to appear at given times and places, and to produce what sells, whether they believe in it or not. It depends on contracts.
Lynette Fromme
#59. Growing around great musicians, you just can't help it. I identified with it immediately. It was something that was so natural to me that when I started singing, it was almost like speaking.
Whitney Houston
#60. I consider my job [being a musician] is to have a little idea and nurture it and put it in some form that everybody else can understand and then sort of pass it on. It's really a passing through. In other words, you receive and you transmit.
Keith Richards
#61. I've loved many women ... I'm not going to lie to you, but it never works ... vanity always gets in the way.
Cassandra Giovanni
#63. There was no way we were going to let this band hobble around on three legs. We chose the route that every professional actor, athlete and musician should do - leave the legend intact and bow out at the top.
Tommy Lee
#64. I'm such a copycat."I want to try and do this like the Donovan song 'Changes'," or "I want to do this bit from Van Morrison." I don't know how else to illustrate something, because I'm not a super-great musician. In that way, I'm more like the producer.
Eleanor Friedberger
#65. Sometimes I joke around that if I weren't a musician, I would be a power lifter. I don't think people expect it from me because I'm little.
Mirah
#66. I'm having to cope with the fact that some people might consider me a musician.
Grant Evans
#67. My dad was a musician, and that was his first love, and I think probably, to be really honest, it was my first love as well.
Kim Basinger
#68. I was so self-critical. I still am; but it's not as bad anymore.
Fiona Apple
#69. I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.
Tom Waits
#70. When I hear a great musician, I can feel his life inside the music.
John McLaughlin
#71. And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art.
Neil Gaiman
#72. I'm a musician, so for the most part I've always thought that the musicians were equally as inspiring to listen to - maybe more so, in some cases - in addition to the artists.
Vince Gill
#73. Many of the African musicians are well-schooled and well-versed ... what they do takes a high level of musicianship.
Jake Holmes
#74. Find what you're best at and exaggerate it.
Steve Vai
#75. My husband is a musician, and 'Paste' is one of his favorite places to be interviewed by.
Claire Coffee
#76. I have a deep respect for musicians, and I feel like I would want to be so prepared and so well-educated and deep in the process before I ever release anything.
Rashida Jones
#77. I can honestly say my music is always going to be greater than my business side. Because I'm naturally a musician. And I don't have to get paid, I don't even have to have businesses. Business is business. And music is life.
Lil' Wayne
#78. People don't understand what music really is. I've been a musician since I was 6 years old. I got my first piano, was playing recitals at 8, 10 I picked up a guitar, 12 I picked up my first Pearl Master drum set. I was an artist before I was an 'artist.'
Mitchel Musso
#79. Verbal communication about music is impossible except among musicians.
Virgil Thomson
#80. Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.
Beck
#81. There's no continuity in videos ... you can jump around all over the place. In features, you can't throw in a close-up of a musician stomping on a guitar - you have to film a scene.
Tamra Davis
#82. We are musicians, entertainers. We can do it. We have the right tools. No worries.
Pete Townshend
#83. When talking about writing, I often use the analogy of archaeology. There are these great tunes all around. Your skill as a musician allows you to pick them out without breaking them.
Pat Metheny
#84. It's important me as a musician and also as an occasional show goer to feel the presence of a band on stage, to hear a PA reverberating and slapping off the walls, the push and pull of an audience, the blood, sweat, and heat. It's a primal thing in a way.
Jacob Bannon
#85. I would like for people to not be stuck by the rules of what is expected of a classical musician. If you really want to do something different, don't be afraid to do so. Think of music itself and not the rules or expectations of people.
Charlie Albright
#86. I am not what I would consider truly a musician. I am an inventor. I am an innovator.
Kanye West
#87. I grew up in a musical family, but nobody was a professional musician.
Joshua Bell
#89. 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.
Charlie Parker
#90. Loss is a peculiar thing. It drives creativity, and it fuels the dark emotions that inspire a designer or writer or musician to bring forth a creative child whole-cloth. It is loss that compels creativity.
R.B. Chesterton
#91. You get a lot of who you are as a musician across through the music you write. If you're writing your own music, then it's important to be really honest.
Harry Styles
#92. I have a real love of sound and the shape of the sound. I'm a musician, and I'm fascinated with the effects of sound, and tone, and pitch and melody and all that sort of stuff.
Guy Pearce
#93. Musicians can travel all over the world and have an audience, because there's no language barrier.
Tommy Chong
#94. I am an untrained musician and a common man's singer.
Kailash Kher
#95. I am a musician. I didn't know I would be so when I was young. I do know that I have always heard music in my head that I wasn't hearing somewhere else and I 'needed' this music. And obedient to the laws of nature, I created into this vacuum.
Jane Siberry
#96. It is the individual voice, present to itself, that needs to be heard. We need to hear the process of the musician working on himself. We don't need to hear who is more clever with synthesizers. Our cleverness has created the world we live in, which in many ways, we're sorry about.
Keith Jarrett
#97. I think some of the musicians are more like punk rock musicians. It's like an art as opposed to being a musician. It's definitely more radical psychedelic bands, more than anything.
Wayne Coyne
#98. Buddy Rich was one of the most incredible technicians in the world, on this planet, but the only people he could really impress, who knew what he was doing was another musician or another drummer.
Dick Dale
#99. This is our culture, and I don't care who the musician is, if he avoids black people, then he is scared of something. He doesn't have confidence in himself or else he doesn't believe in what he's doing.
Betty Carter
#100. My secret dream has always been to be a jazz musician. I tried the saxophone for a year or two when I was younger, but unfortunately I had to face the fact that I was not really talented!
Gaspard Ulliel
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