Terry Riley Quotes

#1. I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

Brian Eno

#2. Parallels between classical and pop are not new. The whole San Francisco movement of John Cage and Terry Riley went hand in glove with what the Velvet Underground were doing.

Charles Hazlewood

#3. I'm trying to use people like Meredith Monk and Philip Glass and Terry Riley as the backing tracks for new pop songs. It's really hard trying to use the format and write a pop song on top of avant-garde music, so we'll see. It could be cool, or it could totally flop.

Autre Ne Veut

#4. You have to have something bigger than you. You have to have a goal that is greater than you.

Robert Herjavec

#5. Throughout the evening I would be recording these long saxophone delays and about four hours into the concert, if I wanted to take a break I would just play back the saxophone.

Terry Riley

#6. It is important that we are coming up on the millennium because what I am experiencing, just being one person out of billions, is the feeling of acceleration. I experience this through my contact with other people.

Terry Riley

#7. I had been interested in Indian music and I actually started studying Tableaus before I met him.

Terry Riley

#8. The reason crucifixion was so common is because it was so cheap. It could be carried out almost anywhere; all one needed was a tree. The torture could last for days without the need for an actual torturer.

Reza Aslan

#9. There's a divinity that shapes beauty from our rough hewn lives.

Brent Weeks

#10. New Rule: This Valentine's Day Americans must remember that politicians are like a box of chocolates. We bite into them to find out what's on the inside only to discover that Democrats are too often soft and gooey and Republicans are mostly nuts.

Bill Maher

#11. We are either going to dissolve as a human race or we are going to break through into a new understanding of what it is to be a human being.

Terry Riley

#12. I'm from South Georgia, so my mom, she always cooked some dang good food when I was growing up.

Phillip Phillips

#13. I had already done Rainbow in Curved Air and had a big record on CBS. I was launched to have a long career and then I just dropped out and went to India.

Terry Riley

#14. There is nobody else for me, and I don't want anybody else

Noah

#15. Believe one who knows: you will find something greater in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters. Saint Bernard de Clairvaux

Claire Dunn

#16. The incredible thing about the human mind is that is didn't come with an instruction book.

Terry Riley

#17. Every woman feels she is too old and has missed the boat.

Felicity Kendal

#18. The great thing about string quartets is the players are kind of like family. They work really well as a unit, so you can write things that let them use those talents of association and intuition-all the things they've developed together as a group.

Terry Riley

#19. Talking about the all night concerts, I did some of the first all night concerts back in the 60's with this little harmonium, and I also had saxophone taped delays.

Terry Riley

#20. Keep a sense of humor. Over and over, I see that levity helps diffuse practically any difficult situation - which

Gretchen Rubin

#21. Well I guess my music came to prominence around one piece called 'In C' which I wrote in 1964 at that time it was called 'The Global Villages for Symphonic Pieces', because it was a piece built out of 53 simple patterns and the structure was new to music at that time.

Terry Riley

#22. Acceleration is finite, I think according to some laws of physics.

Terry Riley

#23. I had always been more interested in playing and improvising than sitting down at a desk and writing out a piece. I'd always found it more fun to play, and the other a little bit tedious. I always had trouble with the decisions.

Terry Riley

#24. Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex. But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at. It is a spiritual state of oneness.

Terry Riley

#25. I can't do the whole run but I am able to start the race and I will be there at the end when winners cross the line.

Fabrice Muamba

#26. Friendship includes talking others off their ledges, and letting them talk you off yours. - Jenni Davenport

Gary Chapman

#27. I was using tape loops for dancers and dance production. I had very funky primitive equipment, in fact technology wasn't very good no matter how much money you had.

Terry Riley

#28. It seems like we are moving towards something, some kind of point and it is probably going to be an important point in our development or dissolution. That is what everybody seems to be thinking.

Terry Riley

#29. For me, self-esteem-building and confidence-building is the foundation for anything that we do, whether you want to be a writer, a painter, or a entrepreneur.

Hill Harper

#30. It's not what happens to you in life that matters; what matters is how you deal with it!

Terry Riley

#31. One antidote for sexual truancy lies in simply teaching youth the wonder, the miracle, the reverence for the creation of life itself. Life is a divine creation. You don't take chances with creation.

Sam Levenson

#32. It is a mistake for anyone to think he has lived too long in his old, unsatisfactory ways to make the great change. If you switch on the light in a dark room, it makes no difference how long it was dark because the light will still shine. Be teachable. That is the whole secret.

Vernon Howard

#33. The highest point of music for me is to become in a place where there is no desire, no craving, wanting to do anything else. It is the best place you have ever been, and yet there is nothing there.

Terry Riley

#34. War, at the best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration, is one of the most terrible.

Abraham Lincoln

#35. I really didn't have a plan, I just went in and started playing. one of my specialties was to be able to play for a really long time without stopping and I would play these repeated patterns for hours and hours and I wouldn't seem to get tired.

Terry Riley

#36. Out of doing all that experimentation with sound I decided I wanted to do it with live musicians. To take repetition, take music fragments and make it live. Musicians would be able to play it and create this kind of abstract fabric of sound.

Terry Riley

#37. Everyone seems to be in a kind of accelerated time mode that is beyond their own control.

Terry Riley

#38. Essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.

Terry Riley