Quotes About Musicians

#1. Theory is a six-letter dirty word to most musicians, but hey, musicians love dirty words, right? And just like all the other dirty words, theory is easy to learn and fun to use!

Ray Harmony

#2. The Musicians Union declared you couldn't mime on Top Of The Pops, which is obviously impossible, if you've got a studio-based record that you'd worked on for a year or something. And there were a lot of terrible performances. Because on Top Of The Pops, you were just thrown onstage.

David Toop

#3. Musicians have made incredible contributions to the conservation and environmental movement and continue to do so, more than ever.

Paul Watson

#4. I was interested in music and making movies about musicians, but my own experiences, and doing what it felt like for me to be a drummer? Nah, I wasn't interested in that.

Damien Chazelle

#5. Meeting actors and TV personalities is one thing, but I just feel like meeting musicians is the coolest.

Shaun White

#6. I love art, and it plays a huge role in my life. It's definitely one of my greatest joys, and I'm a bit fanatical about certain painters and poets and musicians and sculptors.

Jandy Nelson

#7. I think musicians and artists are the most philanthropic people I know. Their charity record of the music business would hold up to the work of anybody.

Glenn Frey

#8. I'd seen musicians act, and it scares me. And they make more money than me.

Tim Roth

#9. I can't really say enough about Chris Potter. He is one of the greatest musicians I have ever known, and every second I have been on the band stand with him has been an absolute pleasure.

Pat Metheny

#10. I happen to think that computers are the most important thing to happen to musicians since the invention of cat-gut which was a long time ago.

Robert Moog

#11. I like the idea of being a student, and I play with very good musicians. So playing with them allows me to get better. My aim is to get better, but I really love it for its own sake.

Jeff Goldblum

#12. Success breeds volume, and it's just amazing how many young writers, artists, and musicians there are in town.

Steven Curtis Chapman

#13. I went to college and stage school, and thought about acting, but ... I just don't like actors very much! They're not as fun as musicians.

Martha Wainwright

#14. The Musicians Hall of Fame is chosen by thousands of your peers. So it's the real thing.

Dick Dale

#15. I have one message for young musicians around the world: Stay true to your heart, believe in yourself, and work hard.

Joe Cocker

#16. Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.

Tony Wilson

#17. It was physically difficult, adjusting to wheelchair life, but I remember a great relief and happiness that I was finally getting somewhere, finding musicians to work with that were sympathetic.

Robert Wyatt

#18. From the time I moved to San Francisco in 1967 to play with the Steve Miller Band, there was a lot of support in the music community for one cause or another, but this one was special because it was put on by people who understood where musicians' hearts are.

Boz Scaggs

#19. The only way that Hollywood ever skews toward liberal is because part of what we make out of Hollywood involves writers, actors, directors, musicians, set designers, and photographers. In general, people like that are going to be more progressive, more open minded, a little more altruistic.

Adam McKay

#20. Actors always want to be musicians, and musicians want to be actors.

Marilyn Manson

#21. I've been a big believer in musicians turned actor, going back to Sinatra winning the Oscar for 'From Here To Eternity.' David Bowie in 'Man Who Fell to Earth,' Kris Kristofferson's been great in a bunch of films. Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand, Mariah Carey, I thought was great in 'Precious.'

Peter Berg

#22. They sign a bunch of women, and they call it a movement. I don't like the way women in music have been identified as women first and musicians second.

Michelle Shocked

#23. My musical education started in the limelight, because I found myself surrounded by real musicians, but after my career had taken off.

John Lurie

#24. Also usually employed one or more resident physicians, barbers, priests, painters, musicians, minstrels, secretaries and copyists, an astrologer, a jester, and a dwarf, besides pages and squires.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#25. I was singing when I was two years old, and my parents were very supportive, but they weren't musicians themselves.

John Oates

#26. The world is full of musicians who can play great, and you wouldn't cross the road to see them. It's people who have this indefinable attitude that are the good ones.

Nick Lowe

#27. We're not getting paid. We have these great musicians with us and it gives us a real charge. And the audience gives us a charge, because they keep it interesting all the time.

Tina Weymouth

#28. The most important thing for the conductor is that he or she listens. Her listening will make things sound a certain way. If the conductor listens well, the musicians listen each other better. The conductor can in effect impose a certain kind of listening for everybody.

Laurence Equilbey

#29. I don't control it at all. It's all up to the musicians in the group. They control it. They make all the cues, and they tell me what they want, and then I act like a mirroring device so that everyone can see what the cues are.

John Zorn

#30. I come from a family of musicians. Even the sewing machine is a Singer.

Frank Carson

#31. It might be argued that genuine spontaneity is not really possible or desirable so long as printed scores of great works exist. All modern musicians are, for better or worse, prisoners of Gutenberg.

Donal Henahan

#32. 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

#33. I find a lot of up-and-coming musicians I enjoy, present them to my viewers - and hopefully inflate the growth of these artists by putting them in front an audience that wouldn't have been aware of them.

Connor Franta

#34. I think that there's a lot of good will that exists between musicians and the people that support them and listen to them.

Jeff Tweedy

#35. First, it doesn't surprise me that traditional music has experienced a kind of exhaustion in the 20th century - not forgetting that many musicians started to look outside the traditional structures of tonality.

Pierre Schaeffer

#36. You've got certain guys that just want to be famous and then you've got the real musicians that just love playing music.

Zakk Wylde

#37. I love the idea of using film language similarly to how musicians use music - combining images and sounds in a way that they create an emotional effect.

Damien Chazelle

#38. This is a great opportunity for musicians to display their talent by re-interpreting some classic Kinks songs. Good luck, enjoy, be creative ... be outrageous!

Ray Davies

#39. We live in a world where art exists in galleries and museums, and musicians have to play the same venues over and over.

Doug Aitken

#40. Music might tame and civilize wild beasts, but 'tis evident it never yet could tame and civilize musicians.

John Gay

#41. 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

#42. The Americans expect great things of me ... If the small Czech nation can have such musicians, they say, why could not they, too, when their country and people is so immense.

Antonin Dvorak

#43. In a jazz atmosphere, the audience members were so quiet and respectful of the musicians that you felt you were almost part of a meeting at a church or a temple, where everyone was completely in tune with the sermon and what the whole event was about.

David Amram

#44. I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#45. The people in Japan know more about the history of jazz and the musicians than the people in the United States do.

Billy Higgins

#46. A lot of musicians are good cooks, and a lot of cooks are musicians, but I think that may just be a result of the creative impulse finding several means of expression. Probably an equivalent number are visual artists, woodworkers or compulsive liars.

Steve Albini

#47. Musicians have always had a better understanding of love than the rest of us. Over the years they have told us that love: is like a rock, is here to stay, is all you need, will find a way, will keep us together, will tear us apart, sucks.

Cuthbert Soup

#48. I think the musicians I play with solo do a certain thing that the musicians we play with with the Indigo Girls don't do. It's just a different thing. And it sort of steers my writing in some ways.

Amy Ray

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

Dan Bejar

#50. If the records that I make have one thing in common, it's that there is little recapitulation, and the idea is that it should end in a place very different from where it began, and that you've heard musicians undergo a change or be irreversibly transformed.

David Grubbs

#51. I love anyone who breaks the rules, and musicians always break the rules - in an aggressive way.

Donatella Versace

#52. Many of the greatest composers and musicians do their best work in extreme confinement but we are seeing it in other fields - uses of technology to link people together in networks to solve problems and almost certainly we'll get better ideas than we would from them just doing it on their own.

Geoff Mulgan

#53. THE GODS was my first professional band and I learned a lot during that time. It was very cool playing with so many great musicians as it helped me to learn.

Ken Hensley

#54. I think the future looks great for music, musicians, bass players, and all we love about music.

Billy Sheehan

#55. I live in Topanga Canyon, which is like a faux-rustic enclave in Los Angeles. I love the sounds of all the critters outside - the frogs, owls, crickets, and birds. Some of the birds around here are pretty accomplished musicians. You can learn a lot from them.

Cliff Martinez

#56. The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are.

Stephen J. Rivele

#57. My family were all musicians. I really wasn't interested in school or anything.

Tommy Bolin

#58. Naturally, no one knows more about music than musicians. They talk about their own work all the time, but they rarely get to talk about other people's music.

Michael Azerrad

#59. As a composer you want to tell musicians two completely contradictory things. You want to say, "Play exactly what I wrote, but bring your own thing to it." In a lot of ways they feel like opposites, but in a sense, my job is to cajole or encourage decisions that I approve of.

Nico Muhly

#60. Okay, you can stay at home and Spotify, or YouTube, or you can get off your ass and come listen to what real musicians making real music sound like. And, hey, it doesn't have to be me, but if I'm in town, then yeah, you should definitely check me out.

Nicholas Payton

#61. I love Fun. They're great guys. They're incredible artists and musicians.

Janelle Monae

#62. Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.

Tom Waits

#63. Alan Lomax is the person who I think should be given major credit for what has been called the "Folk Song Revival." My father participated with him because my father was a musicologist and urged trained musicians to learn about "the vernacular."

Pete Seeger

#64. I don't know if you have ever seen the Woody Allen film 'Annie Hall,' but it is, in a way, to Los Angeles and 'Hollywood' what 'This Is Spinal Tap' is to many musicians.

Henry Rollins

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Bonnie Raitt

#68. My story starts with me as a fan. And to be a fan is to know that loving trumps being beloved. All the affection I poured into bands, into films, into actors and musicians, was about me and my friends.

Carrie Brownstein

#69. 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

#70. How many physicians, scientists, teachers, pastors, missionaries, statesmen, musicians, businessmen, and notable contributors to society have been murdered in the womb?

Chuck Baldwin

#71. I feel the theatre is the most unique one of all [the arts] for collaboration. I feel very fortunate to be in a field where I really do get to have long conversations with the visual artists, the actors, the musicians. It's all art forms rolled into one and I feel very fortunate to be a part of it.

Susan Stroman

#72. Musicians had been assholes since the day the lute was invented.

Nick Hornby

#73. Many classical musicians lack pulse and rhythmical strength and precision, so for us it was very important to acquire and learn those.

Luka Sulic

#74. Musicians always have music in their heads about their perceptions of the world.

Pattie Boyd

#75. By and large, musicians respect New York audiences, and also are greatly concerned about New York reviews.

Harold C. Schonberg

#76. 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

#77. My parents were serious working musicians, but they were not stars - not like pop stars that you have now. They had to make a living and that meant touring, working hard, going on the road - and we were roped in.

Rufus Wainwright

#78. With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music.

Matisyahu

#79. I don't talk about my personal life. But the relationships I've had have usually been with other musicians. It's just easier that way.

Shelby Lynne

#80. Someone once wrote that musicians are touched on the shoulder by God, and I think it's true. You can make other people happy with music, but you can make yourself happy too. Because of my music, I have never known loneliness and never been depressed.

John Berendt

#81. I think musicians should stay off television generally.

Sufjan Stevens

#82. I feel really different from other musicians.

Mary Timony

#83. When we came into the studio I became more and more me, making the tracks and choosing the musicians, partly because a great deal of the time during Bridge, Artie wasn't there.

Paul Simon

#84. Writing songs with Brian and performing them with Al Jardine, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, David Marks, Bruce Johnston and many other brilliant musicians over the years is my legacy, and something of which I am very proud and protective.

Mike Love

#85. Oh yes, children often commit murders. And quite clever ones, too. Some murderers, particularly the distinguished ones who are going to make great names for themselves, start amazingly early ... Like mathematicians and musicians. Poets develop later.

John Lee Mahin

#86. No, it's the musicians and I must say they are an accomplished bunch, but odd, as musicians tend to be. Is it the vibration from their instruments, do you suppose, working on the brain? All that fraught buzzing?

Robertson Davies

#87. Designers and musicians are primed to keep thinking forward. Once an album or collection launches, you can only think about doing the next one.

Chris Benz

#88. The musicians recommend that I sing a sing the way it is written the first time and then start to look for other notes that aren't in the melody.

Margaret Whiting

#89. In spite of the bans which musicians and music teachers have placed on it, the people still demand and enjoy Ragtime.

James Weldon Johnson

#90. Those intellectuals are our natural enemies; the only kind who are worth anything are the musicians and the dancers: they don't insult anybody with their performances, and they neither sing nor dance politics. So I like them; but don't let me hear a word about the rest

Alfred De Vigny

#91. I was a 'Big Brother' fan. I thought they were better musicians than their detractors claimed, but more to the point, technical accomplishment was not something I cared about.

Ellen Willis

#92. I came together with younger musicians and tried to pass on my own experiences. In the process, I always tried to maintain my curiosity and spontaneity.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

#93. We're not spokespeople, we're musicians.

Ed O'Brien

#94. I've dated a couple of guys who were awesome, and the celebrity part of my life and the traveling part are hard to get around. You never get to see each other, especially if you're both musicians.

Kelly Clarkson

#95. I haven't had that many people onstage for a while, and I'm looking forward to that. They're all such creative musicians in their own right. They're all complete individuals. They're not just a pick-up band. They all have their own thing going on.

Andrew Bird

#96. Music truly heals, and I am so grateful to have learned that through Musicians on Call.

Rachel Platten

#97. Nobody gives a crap if we're great musicians.

Frank Zappa

#98. I mean, roots musicians - we can get old, you know? We can get up there and wear overalls and deliver the songs, we don't have to look any certain way.

Valerie June

#99. To the steampunk community, including artisans like Richard "Doc" Nagy (sadly lost to us) and musicians like Professor Elemental, Steam Powered Giraffe, Vagabond Opera, and Abney Park. You are an endless source of joy and inspiration,

Lisa Mantchev

#100. There's no difference in a lot of people's minds between good musicians and popular musicians.

Dweezil Zappa