Musician Quotes

#1. My father, Arinze Ejiofor , was a musician and a doctor. Nobody's ever asked me about that combination and what growing up in that environment was like.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#2. I also had a brother who was like me a musician and a composer. A man of great talent, far more gifted than I. He died very young ... he killed himself in the prime of his life.

Gustav Mahler

#3. It's been important to me to be a good activist, a good thinker, a good musician, a good singer, and a good entertainer. You can't do it all, but I have walked those delicate lines as best I know how.

Holly Near

#4. I'm not good enough, technically, to be a classic musician. I lack discipline.

Ritchie Blackmore

#5. Instead of going to college, I spent my time out on the road learning how to be a better musician.

Miranda Lambert

#6. I'm a musician first, a food-lover second, a dirty mouth with feet, and a girl last time I checked.

Tori Amos

#7. If I hadn't turned out to be a filmmaker, I would have been a musician.

Bahman Ghobadi

#8. I was a frustrated musician, frustrated designer, frustrated art director, frustrated novelist, right. I'd fail at all these different professions.

Jeffrey Zeldman

#9. I feel very honored to be playing with Bill Pierce. He's such a great musician.

Kevin Eubanks

#10. The internet has a way of mainstreaming everything. Any artist, any musician, any sexual kink, any political view point, it's all there.

Arthur Jones

#11. My job of being a musician in a recording studio has nothing to do with being a musician being on tour performing.

Moby

#12. Only by pairing knowledge with inspiration will art evolve. Without these conditions any musician will remain a flawed artist, if one may speak of an artist at all.

Hector Berlioz

#13. When a musician . . . does not have the ability to bend the souls of listeners to where he wishes, his skill and knowledge may be considered null and vain. - Vincenzo Galilei, 1581

Bruce Haynes

#14. There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture - that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.

William Kingdon Clifford

#15. The deeper I get into my life as a musician, I'm discovering that it becomes less and less about other people, and more about what I want to do. And that's a good place to be.

Billy Corgan

#16. My dad was a musician, it was just what he did, like another guy's dad drives a meat truck. Our house was normal. We weren't taken with the fact our dad was a musician.

Branford Marsalis

#17. Being a musician is a job - it is just a really fun one!

Colbie Caillat

#18. Kenny Burrell is a great musician and his music has helped to make me what I am today.

Stevie Wonder

#19. The way we got Phil Collins for 'Tarzan' was that we heard around the studio that he was looking for a Disney project, and we got him. It seemed like a perfect match. Phil is a great musician.

Kevin Lima

#20. I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.

Sam Shepard

#21. I always wanted to be a full-time musician. Every television job I had was a means to buy a grand piano, or to put in a recording studio, or something like that.

John Tesh

#22. I was trying to put myself in a bottle that would one day wash up on the beach for my children. If I were a painter, I would have painted for them. If I were a musician, I would have composed music. But I am a lecturer. So I lectured.

Randy Pausch

#23. Angelo Badalamenti brought me into the world of music and that's really what gave me permission to get into it even though I'm not a musician. It's just an intuitive thing for me.

David Lynch

#24. music is the great love of the People. If we sing a beautiful song, if we faithfully remember all the words, the People will never abandon us. Without the musician, all life would be loneliness.

Madeleine Thien

#25. I think my biggest musical hero growing up was probably Ian MacKaye. He set a great example for all of us local musicians. Still, to this day, I see him as the best example of a right-on musician.

Dave Grohl

#26. I'm not more than a musician that enjoys what he does and a Colombian that dreams and fights for peace in his country.

Juanes

#27. A good film demands its own score, and if you are a musician, your conscience will never allow you to do something mediocre for a good film.

A.R. Rahman

#28. Spirituality is worthless if it's not practical. Music is my work. I am a musician.

John McLaughlin

#29. Being an actor is a much more structured life than being a musician.

Grant-Lee Phillips

#30. I've been able to make a good living as a musician, but now it's time to do all the other stuff.

Robyn Hitchcock

#31. It's a scary question for a musician or songwriter today - what does the future hold? It is a strange time in the music business too; it feels like we are all in some kind of transitional period, stuck between old technology and new.

Dean Wareham

#32. I'm not a good enough musician to like completely master something in a couple of days and turn it around.

Bear McCreary

#33. I'm not a musician - I'm a ham.

Ozzy Osbourne

#34. I've seen myself do stuff on stage that was pretty amazing. I think that would be true for any athlete. Any top athlete will see something that they are very proud of. All my injuries will attest to the fact that besides being a musician, it comes down to being an athlete.

Paul Stanley

#35. The only thing I have ever really cared to be known as is a musician.

John Tesh

#36. I guess every musician looks forward to a point where they can just kind of make an album that truly is like a nice art album.

Emma Stone

#37. When I was growing up and wanted to be a musician, the fantasy that I had of what the music industry was is so wrong.

Matty Mullins

#38. It's playing with the idea of what musicians wear when they play live, especially focusing on the evolution of what a musician wears when they first start their career, when they are young and wild, to how they dress when they become famous and more polished.

Renzo Rosso

#39. I'm very unstable; there's no stability in a musician's life at all. You live on a bus or on the road hand to mouth and you don't know where your money's coming from.

James Taylor

#40. People find it hard to understand how I can risk ruining my career as a musician by injuring myself on the slopes, but I've always been a tomboy.

Vanessa Mae

#41. I'm having fun just being a musician as well as an artist at this point.

Peabo Bryson

#42. Music comes from the musician, not the instrument.

Victor Wooten

#43. One of my really good friends in New York is a musician and looks just like Lindsay Buckingham. We always fancied ourselves the nice Fleetwood Mac.

Lauren Cohan

#44. My brother is the lifelong musician; he made the choice to do that when we were very, very young kids. I remember him playing in bands and listening to the music he was writing in the house - he's nine years older than me.

Kevin Bacon

#45. I left an office at the top of the Pan Am Building, a nine-room apartment, and a farm in Vermont because I was aching inside. It took an analyst to tell me I could write a note of permission to become a musician and sign it.

Michael Masser

#46. If you are a musician,
sing to one as if you were singing to a million.
If you are a dancer,
dance to one as if you were dancing to a million.
If you are a performer,
perform to one as if you were performing to a million.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#47. I've been making electronic music for twenty some odd years but, because I grew up playing in punk rock bands, when I started touring, I thought in order to be a viable touring musician I had to do it with a band. I would DJ or tour with a full rock band.

Moby

#48. Because fashion essentially is art, and as an artist and someone who is also a musician and an artist in regards to drawing and painting, anything I can do that expresses my feelings is something I'm really drawn to.

Ruby Rose

#49. The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.

Oscar Wilde

#50. When I was about 12, I knew I wanted to be a musician. The blues had so much emotion and so much feeling; if you don't have that, you're not going to be good at it.

Johnny Winter

#51. My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author.

Bryce Courtenay

#52. Most musicians don't write about being a musician cause most musicians aren't writers.

Dan Bejar

#53. I love writing songs and being a musician, but you can't really buy the feeling of connecting with people.

Michael Kiwanuka

#54. I am not, and have no interest in being, a musician of any kind.

Karrine Steffans

#55. I still have a hard time just calling myself a musician. If I'm talking to somebody and they ask me what I do, I say I play music ...

Grant Evans

#56. I tried to sing 'What's Going On' with Amy Winehouse once at an old cinema in the West End. There was a funk band that had members of both of our bands playing in it, but it was the worst kind of place to sing bad karaoke because everyone there was an amazing singer or musician.

Jamie Cullum

#57. And that is the essence of wisdom - to be in harmony with nature, with the natural rhythm of the universe. And whenever you are in harmony with the natural rhythm of the universe, you are a poet, you are a painter, you are a musician, you are a dancer.

Osho

#58. Christina Aguilera is an incredible musician and singer.

Debbie Harry

#59. For me, songwriting starts with a melody. When a musician plays a chord progression, either the words and vocal melody come to me, or they don't. That's how I determine who to write with. It works, or it doesn't.

Rain Phoenix

#60. All five hundred boys want to go out with the same ten anorexic girls." She said, "I'm a good musician, but not many guys are looking for a girl that plays great Bach preludes.

Mary Pipher

#61. In actuality it's drum samples in the computer. I don't know, I've just never really dug into that whole technology thing, I feel like it hurts me as a musician a little.

The Rocket Summer

#62. There's times I've been quite nervous doing session work, such as when I'm asked to play the violin in a 'country and western' style or a 'gypsy' style. I'm not very good at that sort of playing at all. I think it's important as a session musician to have your own voice.

Ric Sanders

#63. I asked the head musician if I could go onstage during the next break and he said sure. I got two laughs in twenty minutes, and walked out feeling more elated than I had ever felt in my entire life. The glory of that triumph contented me for two full years.

Emo Philips

#64. I didn't decide to become a musician until the age of 15, which is quite late.

Evelyn Glennie

#65. I'm not really calculated enough or trained enough as a musician or songwriter to create a style in order to please people. Ultimately, I just have to do what I like to do.

Jane Wiedlin

#66. People make art on the sides of buildings, and they'll make art on the sides of trains. They'll make art wherever they decide to make art. The technology that people are working with now will be replaced in 10 years, so that's not where your future is, if you're a musician.

T Bone Burnett

#67. No, I've heard over the years that it's nice for them to see somebody who's like, you know, a well-known successful musician who's Asian. I've heard it from a few musicians, too.

James Iha

#68. The moral arguments against war are irrefutable. As the musician Edwin Starr put it, War. Hunh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

Steven Pinker

#69. Almost all the producers I know and dig, like Quincy Jones or Brian Eno, are really musicians first. I'm a composer, an orchestrator, an arranger and a musician first. I know how to write and rewrite songs, and the genius is really in the rewriting.

Nile Rodgers

#70. When I was 17 or 18 and it was time to figure out what to do with my life, I realized that I didn't enjoy anything as much as I enjoyed playing music. I felt that I had no choice: that I had to become a musician.

David Sanborn

#71. Every musician writes about past relationships. And other than that, I can promise you, I have very little in common with Taylor Swift.

Tom Odell

#72. I don't have to compete in the charts. I can just be myself as a musician, a songwriter and play with the musicians that I really love.

Elton John

#73. I think that if a real princess was lost in this modern world and she could be whatever she wanted, she would be a musician,' Blanche said slowly. 'A violinist, or a harpist. That would be the only place where she could find solace for her lost kingdom.

Regina Doman

#74. The idea that I am cynical because I'm writing the books that I write is a bit like someone saying, 'What, you've done a second album? Oh, I see, cashing in on your first album, are you?' But I'm a musician! It's sort of what I do.

Ben Schott

#75. To me, if you're a musician, then you're interested in music, and if you're interested in music, then you should listen to a lot of different types.

Brittany Howard

#76. You've got to do what you know before you know what you're doing."

Duke Madison, Jazz Musician

Andy Martello

#77. I love film, and I would love to be a part of something that people universally love as a piece of film. Sure. Of course I would. And I would love to take acting lessons, and see that side of it someday. But I'm a musician.

Norah Jones

#78. The soul, they say, is divine and the flesh is iniquity. But I am a musician and I ask this - without the wood and the strings of the violin, where would the sonata find form?

Kathleen Valentine

#79. I did art; I made furniture. I didn't want to be a cliche - the Beatle's son who became a musician.

James McCartney

#80. We need improvement in the style of performance. There is no more advantage in a musician who plays and conducts than in one who is only a beater of rhythm.

Franz Liszt

#81. Ike's problem was that he was a musician that always wanted to be a star; and was a star, locally, but never internationally ... so he then changed the name to Ike and changed my name to Tina because if I ran away, Tina was his name. It was patented as you call it.

Tina Turner

#82. As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.

Georges Bizet

#83. He mentioned Beethoven. She had read in the library about that musician - his name was pronounced with an a and spelled with a double e. He was a German fellow like Mozart. When he was living he spoke in a foreign language and lived in a foreign place - like she wanted to do.

Carson McCullers

#84. I really was never any more than what I was -a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.

Bob Dylan

#85. Pablo Casals is a great musician in all he does: a cellist without equal, and extraordinary conductor and composer with something to say. I have been profoundly impressed by all I have heard of his work, but he is a musician of this stature because he is also a great man.

Albert Schweitzer

#86. All comics want to be musicians. There's a part of me that wants to be a serious musician. I love songs about heartache and heartbreak.

Sarah Silverman

#87. Aunt Marion was right ... Never marry a musician, and never answer the door.

Charles M. Schulz

#88. There is nothing normal about a musician's lifestyle; I don't have a nine-to-five job at the post office.

Robin Thicke

#89. My only ambition is to grow as a musician.

Jamie Cullum

#90. If you want to be a doctor, a lawyer you must go to college. But if you want to be a musician or such, study your craft. Study music.

Billy Eckstine

#91. I've been a list maker for years, even before I was a musician. I was always writing things down and kept long lists of things that would make good album titles and things like that. I'm constantly thinking in terms of songwriting.

Buzz Osborne

#92. I never look at myself as a closet actor wanting to make music or a closet musician wanting to act - I'm very proud to do both and I don't put one above the other, I'm very grateful and excited by both opportunities - it's really a unique opportunity to do both.

Jared Leto

#93. I don't think you can be a good musician if you just listen to rap, or just the [type of music] you do. You gotta be open to other ideas.

Freddie Gibbs

#94. I started as a musician. I play the saxophone, but from the age of 17, I realised that it's very hard to make a living as a jazz musician in Australia. So I went for an audition and got an acting job and, fortunately, I completely fell in love with that.

John Polson

#95. If I wasn't a musician ... I think I'd just be endlessly traveling.

Ben Howard

#96. There's no rule that you have to like Henry Rollins the musician or the actor.

Henry Rollins

#97. I feel like when you're an artist and you first come out - people don't want you to be as creative as you could possibly be as a musician. More so they really want you to stick to something.

Kid Ink

#98. But I've always liked to be the kind of drummer and musician who likes to go outside of what's expected of me, and I've always been able to do more than you necessarily hear with every band I've ever played in.

Matt Cameron

#99. People run away, pull their hair, go off in different directions, nodding their heads and going, "Oh, God." I am slightly disheveled, I think. I'm really pleased that I am, because otherwise I could be in a really, really dull and boring place now, as a musician, at least.

Robert Plant

#100. The soul of the great musician can only be expressed in music.

Margaret Fuller