Top 100 Quotes About Musicians
#1. I've always enjoyed the enthusiasm of the best studio musicians and, over the years, have collected so many inspired contributions from them.
Michael Franks
#2. Everyone in my family is an artist in some capacity whether they're musicians, painters, or sculptors, so it's in their blood.
Jessica Alba
#3. A friend of mine took me to Memphis advised me that I should get in the musicians' union. He gave me a set of drums and said, Stay on the job, son.
Levon Helm
#4. I do the work with friends who are musicians as well. I'm working on a piece of music and I have an idea of who I want on the vocals, but I don't really have a list.
Paul Van Dyk
#5. I am not afraid to die because I know heaven is a place of artists, musicians and poets
Rassool Jibraeel Snyman
#6. Monogamous musicians are like vegan hockey players.
Rob Sheffield
#7. I don't think I set out to have a career in female groups, but it's just kind of happened, and by nature of having worked with my sister - growing up with a sister who also plays, and being in communication with other female musicians.
Emily Robison
#8. I was never ready to give up, but I did get words of confidence to move forward from a few musicians that had climbed up the totem pole of rock. They were encouraging words that struck a nerve with me and made me stronger.
Lita Ford
#9. Aleksey and I have gathered together a bunch of kindred spirits who are also versatile musicians. We have a violinist who eats fire, another who is an acrobat, and a flutist who beats boxes. We hope in years to come to tour the U.S. with our 'League of X-traordinary musicians.'
Richard Hyung-ki Joo
#10. Dave walked closer to me, his dark eyes combing my every move. "Do you always hold your guitar like that?"
I dropped my pick. "Do you always shop at Hot Topic?
Tara Kelly
#11. (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.
Tom Waits
#12. Hocking was slender in the way that writers and musicians are sometimes slender: not out of any desire or design but rather because his days were spent being consumed rather than consuming.
Tom Bissell
#13. I have to perfect my beard every morning and it takes a long time. I think a lot of musicians are into graphic design and art. I decided to be a little bit of an artist on my face.
Craig David
#14. For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.
Nat King Cole
#15. I think it's a shame when you come across young actors and musicians who haven't had the time to learn their craft. It doesn't matter if it's acting or music; you really have to learn how to do it from the bottom up because unless you have a great work ethic ... fame is a terrible thing to have.
Denis Leary
#16. Aside from comic book heroes, the only real life heroes I had were musicians.
Andy Biersack
#17. 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
#18. At the upper echelon of musicians in general, I guess performers in general, you have to have this kind of live-or-die, cutthroat mentality.
Damien Chazelle
#19. You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual. Most of them are mangled and even have made up stuff in them, that is to say, made up stuff by the writer or editor.
Frank Black
#20. Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.
Sonny Rollins
#22. Musicians have notes. Painters have paint. Writers have words.
Lisa Fantino
#23. I'm sure you've had many musicians in your soft spot.
Caisey Quinn
#24. I never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn't give a damn.
Jack Kerouac
#25. 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
#26. Artist paint images unseen, musicians create sounds that emerge from silence, and authors write from a synthetic point of view about a world that can never exist.
Carl Henegan
#27. Regarding jam sessions: Jazz musicians are the only workers I can think of who are willing to put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.
George Carlin
#28. Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.
John Perry Barlow
#29. It's insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it's assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It's that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he's telling you something about his own life. It's so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!
Brian Eno
#30. The things I see every day inspire my sound and lyrics, like certain people and situations that stick out in my mind. There are also certain musicians I love whose music and styles inspire me.
Birdy
#31. I can play the guitar and the keys and the drums. I'm not brilliant at any of them. I can sing too. Some of my friends are proper musicians but I'm a song-writer. I write songs.
Jim Sturgess
#32. A lot of young musicians get the money at the wrong time. They get it for something they don't feel great about, and it'll make you feel so bad it'll destroy you and kill you.
Iggy Pop
#33. If drummers are 'anti-solo,' that's up to them. They're musicians, and they can play whatever they want. But my inspirations early on were people like Buddy Rich, seeing him on 'The Tonight Show', or Gene Krupa.
Neil Peart
#34. With pop music and pop musicians, you know everything about everyone all the time, particularly their physical appearance. With female musicians, that's made a big thing of, and I think people, certainly with me, have appreciated a bit of mystery.
Lorde
#35. My father, my uncles, my aunts, from my father's side and my mother's side ... they were all professional musicians. My father was a concert master, he took me to a lot of rehearsals, concerts, performances, opera, ballet. For me, that was life.
Lalo Schifrin
#36. There's always the joy of the performance and fine-tuning new interpretations. Over the years, we've all grown as musicians, so obviously there is a lot of subtlety that wasn't there in the first place.
Chris Squire
#37. I have daughters who are writers and actors but no musicians.
Rosanne Cash
#39. I know too many musicians that have to tour on the same 10 songs, and they burn out. They get back to their house, and they have no reason to write new music. They are music'd out.
Justin Vernon
#40. There are only so many letters in the alphabet. When I talk to young musicians or authors and they ask for advice, I say, 'You gotta learn all the letters of your own personal alphabet. With music, you need to know all the different kinds of music and everything in and around your given instrument.'
David Lee Roth
#41. As long as there are young people, and old people, too, who can imagine realities beyond seeing and touching, and as long as there are poets, and artists, and musicians, there will be unicorns.
Jack Clifford Smith
#42. Add to that six tables of cakes, ices, and punch bowls, a group of seven musicians playing the violin, three hundred candles, and who knew how many courtiers, and the result was a room that made Rachelle feel like she was being punched in the face just by looking at it.
Rosamund Hodge
#43. My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It's very warm, it's very up, it's very down. I would celebrate that.
Nick Clegg
#44. It would have been more obvious to go into film, based on the generation before me, but the generation before them were all composers or classical musicians.
Robert Coppola Schwartzman
#45. 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
#46. I couldn't get session work because most musicians hated my style.
Chris Squire
#47. 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
#48. Somebody might get criticized for doing some movie that totally sucks, then turn around and be incredible. Every actor goes through that, not just musicians who act.
Lance Bass
#49. We [with David Cunningham] did do Top Of The Pops. It was an eye-opener. I mean, one of the things that was so interesting - I've talked about this a few times recently, and people can't believe it - they used to do this thing called tape switch with the Musicians Union.
David Toop
#50. Newspapers and magazines didn't want pictures of musicians behaving badly back then. Now, because of the Internet, that's all the media wants.
Mick Rock
#51. I am very serious about my baby.
Morrissey
#52. What this tells us is that expertise, a deeper understanding of the units, can alter perception. Musicians
Sendhil Mullainathan
#53. He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.
E. M. Forster
#54. There is a big, beautiful world that could be destroyed by selfishness and foolishness. We musicians have it within our power to help save it. In a small way, every single one of us counts.
Pete Seeger
#55. 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
#56. THE GAMBLER,THE NUN,& THE RADIO
Tonight, sent by the police, they come to serenade me.He laughed, then tapped his stomach.-I cannot laugh yet. As musicians they are fatal
Ernest Hemingway,
#57. Many of the African musicians are well-schooled and well-versed ... what they do takes a high level of musicianship.
Jake Holmes
#58. 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
#59. For some reason I can't explain, artist and musicians tend to look younger than our age. Being in music, you need this youthful sense of discovery and wonder for what you're doing and keep your imagination open. That's a youthful way of looking at life and I think that reflects in how you age.
Joshua Bell
#60. For centuries, musicians have sought to find me at the end of a needle or the bottom of a drink. It is an illusion. And it often ends badly. Take
Mitch Albom
#61. Dali's Reclining Woman Wearing a Chemise looks like a dead slaughtered doll, and I can see preying eagles, broken arrows, and jazz musicians in Jackson Pollock, and because I believe that Man Ray and Duchamp were lovers.
Dionne Brand
#62. The hardest thing with musicians is getting them not to play.
Prince
#63. And the feasts on the poop and the musicians.
C.S. Lewis
#64. My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.
Alan Arkin
#65. Verbal communication about music is impossible except among musicians.
Virgil Thomson
#66. We are musicians, entertainers. We can do it. We have the right tools. No worries.
Pete Townshend
#67. When the musical keyboard was created in the 1970's, you had electronic geeks that had no background in music created these devises and gave them to musicians that had no background in electronics. The result was some of the wierd sounds that came out in the '70s.
David Bowie
#68. A cough is the basic sign of inattention. Musicians never, in my experience, cough when playing in public.
Charles Rosen
#69. I'm always trying to think of something clever and fun to do with the music. There's so many cool things musicians and artists can do with their products.
Robert Coppola Schwartzman
#70. I'm not a great inventor from scratch. What I do is to use, steal, acquire, reproduce or re-cycle music from other musicians.
Michael Nyman
#72. I was lucky enough to first meet Elvis at his house in Bel Air and he used to invite different artists, singers and musicians, to come and jam with him at his house.
Jackie DeShannon
#73. Criticism is always hard to take - we musicians are sensitive. It's always hard when someone says something negative - but you try to learn to just let it roll off and not worry about it.
Joshua Bell
#74. The story of Rod Stewart, the story of Carlos Santana is so inspiring to young musicians because it shows in this trendy business how long a career can last. It shows how you can soar back, regardless of age.
Clive Davis
#75. We want to generate the electricity of peace through music, and it's a thrill to know that the super-creative, enthusiastic musicians of our world are with us to achieve this goal.
David Lynch
#76. Since I was 18, I've been under orders from magazines and newspapers - chiefly The New York Times and Rolling Stone - to step into the lives of musicians, actors, and artists, and somehow find out who they really are underneath the mask they present to the public. But I didn't always succeed.
Neil Strauss
#77. One of the best things about Kickstarter and crowdfunding and the collapse of the music business is a lot of artists like me have been forced to face our own weird mess about ourselves and what we thought it meant to become musicians.
Amanda Palmer
#78. Musicians can travel all over the world and have an audience, because there's no language barrier.
Tommy Chong
#79. 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
#80. My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians.
Walter Becker
#81. Everybody can perform, there are so many outlets. Musicians are no longer limited. In the past, the record companies made most of the money. I for one am not sorry to see them fade away.
Jake Holmes
#82. People had this idea about becoming rock stars packing stadiums instead of having the goal of becoming what musicians used to be in terms of how they would perform and connect people.
Amanda Palmer
#83. We wanted to guide the musicians, so we could create our own sound. We would never let the band just go in and play the chord sheets. We were very focused on what we had in mind for these productions.
Lamont Dozier
#84. We're all players and musicians and we sure all get along good. We just clicked right off the bat. We started playing and then we almost immediately started recording.
Krist Novoselic
#85. I don't take compliments very easily. I think most musicians suffer from low self-esteem to some extent.
James Taylor
#86. When you play music you discover a part of yourself that you never knew existed.
Bill Evans
#87. A quiet mind allows the artist to tap into the wellspring of Divine Music within.
Kenny Werner
#88. Great music seems to come from a lot of angst, and that angst is from great musicians getting together with intense chemistry. When that chemistry isn't there, people tend not to write great music.
Peter Hook
#89. One of the other musicians said that the tambourine is a female due to the fact that it makes a pretty jingle and is designed to be spanked. That is the more recent, patriarchal attitude, I suppose.
Tom Robbins
#90. If there are no pop stars churning out those mind-numbing songs, then there are no musicians in the booths backing them up, no clerks running back and forth with tapes, no shop owners selling the music. Taking out one person at the top destroys thousands at the bottom.
Kiera Cass
#91. I think musicians and actors have all these problems, because of the popularity and the opportunity.
Ravi Shankar
#92. That's one thing the musicians don't remember: you don't choose your demographic - they choose you.
Halsey
#93. We're not going to be the coolest rock stars in the world. We're trying to be good musicians.
Eddie Vedder
#94. Astronomers, like burglars and jazz musicians, operate best at night.
Miles Kington
#95. It's a weird thing where, especially in jazz, you have to totally mention cutting sessions and people one-upping each other and people being super, super tough on each other. And out of it emerge these genius musicians.
Damien Chazelle
#96. I think that artists and musicians can do as much harm as good for causes if they tie their names to lots of things, especially if they aren't really doing much to meaningfully push their causes forward.
Damian Kulash
#97. [Too many musicians are] too involved with doing and not listening.
Ray Still
#98. I've worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don't like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art.
Serj Tankian
#99. I don't know why I keep saying this, and I don't know why I keep using their names ... And I'm not dogging them. I'm not slandering them. I'm not saying they are bad musicians. But how can Taylor Swift or Justin Timberlake win for R&B and funk? They are pop singers.
Sharon Jones
#100. It's hard to view myself sometimes as even in the same league as other musicians, mainly because there's so much music before me. I feel overinformed by different styles and different possibilities.
Ryan Adams
