Sonic Quotes

#1. There is no finer sonic-producing weapon for a guitar slayer than a hand crafter Gibson masterpiece.

Ted Nugent

#2. The best way to describe the sonic environment at the '98 CES is:
Imagine that the apocalypse took the form of a cocktail party.

David Foster Wallace

#3. But really important, perhaps most important is the craft; how you make your record, the creation of these sonic worlds you want your listener to hear.

Duncan Sheik

#4. Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic Youth. There's three people writing now, and we've all had a lot of interest and involvement with expression through words.

Thurston Moore

#5. Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.

Nick Hornby

#6. What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

Patti Smith

#7. If the nose has become a deeply disillusioned and grief-stricken organ in the modern world, then what of the ear? The poor little ear - such an innocent, intelligent and sensitive creature; in these times of such flagrant sonic brutality, the sense within the ear has much to contend with.

Michael Leunig

#8. I'm not really much of an actor, so when I started on 'The Daily Show,' I was just trying to adopt the faux authority of a newsperson. Having a British accent definitely gave me a sonic leg up on that because there is a faux authority to the British accent in and of itself.

John Oliver

#9. When I was super young, I had an Atari and used to play 'Space Invaders.' Then I fell in love with 'Mario Bros.,' 'Sonic the Hedgehog' and 'Yoshi' on Super Nintendo. I was quite a bit of a gamer as a kid when I think about it.

Amber Rose

#10. I love to photograph the tools of one's trade: Duncan Grant's paintbrushes, the typewriter of Herman Hesse, or even my own guitar, a 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic.

Patti Smith

#11. See, now there's an idea for an adult panel. Fifty Shades of Gallifrey. Scarf bondage and alternative uses for sonic screwdrivers." Oh,

Kathryn Lively

#12. The collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field. These sonic events are made out of thousands of isolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen as totality, is a new sonic event.

Iannis Xenakis

#13. Dave Guy, the trumpet player, is an incredible musician. He came into the studio one day, and they had just cut a cover of "Sign, Seal, Deliver" for something with Sharon Jones, and I just was blown away by how they got that sonic. I mean, it was just so much the real deal.

Mark Ronson

#14. Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

David Bowie

#15. I was a rapper and a DJ, and if you wanted to be involved in hip-hop, you had to be involved in the sonic, the kinetic and the visual aspects. The visual was graffiti.

Adam Mansbach

#16. Today all sounds belong to a continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive dominion of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the musicians: anyone and anything that sounds!

R. Murray Schafer

#17. Sonic Youth, for better or worse, is/was a machine that carried me along through pregnancy, motherhood, and creative opportunities I never would have achieved on my own. I'm grateful and surprised that we were listened to, loved, ignored, and overrated.

Kim Gordon

#18. Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song.

Thurston Moore

#19. I never sleep before 4 A.M. and usually play 'Sonic the Hedgehog' computer games before bed. I like Sonic - he reminds me of Happy, my hamster that died. I used to stay up and watch Happy.

Martin Millar

#20. Both of my books, 'Love Is a Mix Tape' and 'Talking to Girls About Duran Duran,' are about how music gets tangled up with all our other emotional memories. Since I'm an obsessive music fan, I'm always seeking out new sonic thrills.

Rob Sheffield

#21. Isabelle looked dubious. "Mom and Dad won't be pleased if they find out."
"That you freed a possible criminal by trading away your brother to a warlock who looks like a gay Sonic the Hedgehog and dresses like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Band? Simon inquired. "No, probably not.

Cassandra Clare

#22. And when she told us her wedding song - of course, they've already picked their wedding song, and of course, it's "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong - I said that choosing that song is the sonic equivalent of buying picture frames and never replacing the photos of the models.

Rainbow Rowell

#23. When the Grateful Dead needed a quality sound system to deliver our sonic payload, I learned electronics and speaker design.

Mickey Hart

#24. We never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.

Ben Gibbard

#25. Every once in a while I'll find a new way of playing something, it will suggest itself. But generally speaking, there's a set sonic potential, and that's in concert with a set instrumental technique.

Z'EV

#26. For me, I always have looked at 'indie' as a term of 'independence.' Never associated a sonic gesture with that in the same way that pop music has always meant 'popular' to me; you know, it didn't define a sound.

Solange Knowles

#27. The sonic world of the foyer and vestibule comes at him distorted and from a distance, as if someone's moving furniture underwater.

Dominic Smith

#28. Real spies don't have all the cool gadgets you see in the movies," Dak said, watching Sera struggle with the lock. "Though I sure wish we had a sonic screwdriver right about now.

Jennifer A. Nielsen

#29. "Dark Fantasy" was my long, backhanded apology. You know how people give a backhanded compliment? It was a backhanded apology. It was like, all these raps, all these sonic acrobatics. I was like: "Let me show you guys what I can do, and please accept me back. You want to have me on your shelves."

Kanye West

#30. When people bitch about the death of the vinyl LP as a medium (and lord knows they bitch) what they're mostly lamenting is the death of this kind of listening. Music as a concerted sonic experience, rather than the backing track to a flashing screen. What

Steve Almond

#31. Both analog and digital developments have intensified the viral nature of sonic culture.

Kode9

#32. Diversity is its most consistent characteristic ... The characteristics of freely improvised music are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it.

Derek Bailey

#33. I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.

Kim Gordon

#34. Hardcore groups were singing songs about Ronald Reagan. I wasn't interested in this and preferred to sing about the darkness shimmering beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture. I suppose you could say that Sonic Youth was always trying to defy people's expectations.

Kim Gordon

#35. First, I'm trying to edit down about 7 hours of material which I made prior to the Cop days and find some way to get it out. This stuff is pretty out there, mostly sonic collages and tape manipulations.

Jim Coleman

#36. I've been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it's good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon's voice and Thurston Moore's voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents.

Norman Reedus

#37. Yes, indeed, in fact I would tell you that we go out of our way to be true to the original feeling and sort of sonic and musical pallet that we painted with back then.

James Young

#38. When I went to college, I discovered the Sega console, and 'Sonic the Hedgehog' became very dear to me.

Edgar Wright

#39. I completely understand the responsibility I have in continuing the sonic style that I have created.

Mika.

#40. We were like psychedelic folk combined with Sonic Youth's noise.

Daisy Berkowitz

#41. If there's loads of material going by you don't notice the individual things quite so much. Also it really foregrounds the sonic dimensions like electronic ambient music, it's pushes all of that colour to the foreground so you hear little every atom of sound.

Max Richter

#42. Right now my taste is going more for things that are organic where the people are using all the sonic possibilities in interesting ways.

John Frusciante

#43. I can't think about whether I'll disappoint Sonic Youth fans. It's not like I want people to be disappointed, but I just can't control that.

Kim Gordon

#44. Sonic the hedgehog is a beautiful statement on capitalism. You spend your whole life collecting yellow rings and then hit one spike and lose them all. And there is a fat man who wants to kill you.

Thom Yorke

#45. I don't make sonic booms. I want a whip. I like the idea of walking around making sonic booms everywhere.

Karen Marie Moning

#46. Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don't bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they don't rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can?

Rabih Alameddine

#47. Essentially a joke is creating an idea, whether sonic or visual, whether it's something musical or a traditional joke.

Reggie Watts

#48. I always like to say that the music I'd like to make is somewhere between Pan Sonic and Scott Walker. But I don't sing anything like Scott Walker.

Josh Klinghoffer

#49. With animated film, you have to create the sonic world; there's nothing there. You get to color things in more and you're allowed to overreach yourself a little bit more, and it's great fun.

Hans Zimmer

#50. The sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who might have worked, having been canonically established as being ineffective on wood, but nobody had ever figured out how to use the controls on the blasted thing.

Jim C. Hines

#51. This area produces a protein given the whimsical name Sonic Hedgehog,

Brian Switek

#52. Dropped in from a possible future via a Timeslip, and was currently trying to mend his left leg with a pair of pliers and a sonic screwdriver someone had left behind in the bar. I

Simon R. Green

#53. I think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you're doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.

Kim Gordon

#54. Working in theoretical systems can take away the juice. It can also be very beautiful, but when you're trying to satisfy a theoretical principle rather than a sonic reality, then it can become dry.

Pauline Oliveros

#55. Sensitivity isn't being wimpy. It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom.

Jeff Buckley

#56. I think Americans such as Leviathan have done a lot to expand the sonic palette of black metal.

Colin Marston

#57. I've been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I've always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I've never released it.

Sufjan Stevens

#58. There's only so many small shows you can do. A lot of the smaller things are more side project things. Not everything is appropriate for Sonic Youth to do.

Kim Gordon

#59. I love eating at Sonic with my family in Oklahoma. And no, I'm not kidding.

Kristin Chenoweth

#60. Robin Williams understands sonic performances. He understands what it's like to change your voice up.

Billy West

#61. Composing gives me a chance to work in multiple dimensions and helps me pare down my melodies into what is essential. Learning new skills has always energized me and scoring has opened up a world of sonic possibilities.

Liz Phair

#62. My first album, 'Get Lifted,' was a hip-hop soul album that had some of its roots in the church, as far as the sonic choices, in the way that I sing and write songs. I have always had that as part of my background and part of my influence when I am making music.

John Legend

#63. If someone says 'grunge' or 'punk,' you know what the sound is, but if you say 'No Wave,' it's kind of mysterious. That was the most interesting part and should have been the most inspirational thing about it ... here's this collective sonic insanity, and none of it sounds anything alike.

Lydia Lunch

#64. You have to love writing a song and architecture. You have to give it a form. It is my job to create a sonic landscape. I like to create ambiance and atmosphere. The writing is the intimate part of it. It is a sketch. The production is the whole painting.

Keren Ann

#65. Hip-hop has survived as a sonic practice more than anything else. It's an approach to music-making based in sampling and rhyming over beats, that's proven far more versatile than its detractors thought it would.

Ann Powers

#66. I'm not technical. When I listen to music, I gravitate more toward the sonic aspect of it. The technical stuff of it, I get bored with it. These long solos? OK, already. You know your scales, big deal. I know it, too, but I don't want to do that.

Joey Santiago

#67. I wanted to say, "I'm the Doctor and this is my companion," but I doubted Sophie was a fan of the long-running BBC series. Forget the TARDIS and the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor's best gadget was the psychic paper. I can't tell you how many times I wished I had some.

Kevin Hearne

#68. It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness - sonic goodies.

Frank Ocean

#69. I think science fiction and sound is a really interesting thing. You might as well think of it as sonic fiction.

DJ Spooky

#70. I am voice actor Roger Craig Smith. You may know me as Batman, Captain America, Sonic the Hedgehog, Ezio from Assassin's Creed, Transformers: RID, or narrator of "Say Yes To the Dress" (among many other things). AMA!

Roger Craig Smith

#71. With respect to the ZPA, what kind of digit develops depends on how close the digit is to the source of Sonic hedgehog.

Neil Shubin

#72. That you freed a possible criminal by trading away your brother to a warlock who looks like a gay sonic the Hedgehog and dresses like the childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Cassandra Clare

#73. In England, people had been loudly proclaiming the death of the guitar and the birth of the synthesizer, but Sonic Youth and other American guitar bands started to create a buzz.

Kim Gordon

#74. [...] to overcome my own hypersensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless.

Kim Gordon

#75. A fantastic Riot Boy, Trash the Senses..
-Thurston Moore

David Rat