Quotes by American Authors - Page 95

The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.
Andre Previn
Rests always sound well.
Arnold Schoenberg
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.
John Philip Sousa
Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.
Ornette Coleman
Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.
Dave Brubeck
Jazz came to America 300 years ago in chains.
Paul Whiteman
Don't play what's there play what's not there.
Miles Davis
Canned music is like audible wallpaper.
Alistair Cooke
Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear which remains unsatisfied and even uneasy until it hears something better. I am convinced...that provided the ear be at length made amends there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.
John Cage
Classic music is th' kind that we keep thinkin'll turn into a tune.
Frank McKinney
A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do.
Miles Davis
To hear how special and wonderful we are is endlessly enthralling.
Gail Sheehy
Acting was a way out at first. A way out of not knowing what to do a way of focusing ambitions. And the ambition wasn't for fame. The ambition was to do an interesting job.
Harrison Ford
No leader can be too far ahead of his followers.
Eleanor Roosevelt
A door that seems to stand open must be of a man's size or it is not the door that providence means for him.
Henry Ward Beecher
I have the feeling when I write poetry that I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. You don't think about whether you're going to get money or fame you just do it.
Doris Lund
I look at ordinary people in their suits them with no scars and I'm different. I don't fit with them. I'm where everybody's got scar tissue on their eyes and got noses like saddles. I go to conventions of old fighters like me and I see the scar tissue and all them flat noses and it's beautiful. ... They talk like me like they got rocks in their throats. Beautiful!
Willie Pastrano
The source of continuing aliveness was to find your passion and pursue it with whole heart and single mind.
Gail Sheehy
For a long time the only time I felt beautiful-in the sense of being complete as a woman as a human being and even female-was when I was singing.
Leontyne Price
I'm uncomfortable when I'm comfortable ... I can't help it it's my personality.
Jay Chiat
Getting fit is a political act-you are taking charge of your life.
Jane Fonda
I was the kind nobody thought could make it. I had a funny Boston accent. I couldn't pronounce my R's. I wasn't a beauty.
Barbara Walters
It is healthier in any case to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are.
Alice Walker
Criticism ... makes very little dent upon me unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I'm not going to limit myself just because some people won't accept the fact that I can do something else.
Dolly Parton
Innovators are inevitably controversial.
Eva Le Gallienne
Go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize after something's been done than to get permission ahead of time.
Grace Murray Hopper
Individuals learn faster than institutions and it is always the dinosaur's brain that is the last to get the new messages.
Hazel Henderson
The self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.
Thomas Szasz
That suit is best that best suits me.
John Clark
If you're gonna be a failure at least be one at something you enjoy.
Sylvester Stallone
I searched through rebellion drugs diets mysticism religions intellectu-alism and much more only to begin to find ... that truth is basically simple-and feels good clean and right.
Chick Corea
Our concern must be to live while we're alive ... to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
I is who I is.
Tom Peterson
You have to deal with the fact that your life is your life.
Alex Haley
If we do not rise to the challenge of our unique capacity to shape our lives to seek the kinds of growth that we find individually fulfilling then we can have no security: we will live in a world of sham in which our selves are determined by the will of others in which we will be constantly buffeted and increasingly isolated by the changes round us.
Nena O'Neil
Dress to please yourself.... Forget you are what you wear.... Wear what you are.
Elizabeth Hawkes
Follow what you love! Don't deign to ask what "they" are looking for out there. Ask what you have inside. Follow not your interests which change but what you are and what you love which will and should not change.
Georgie Anne Geyer
There are as many ways to live and grow as there are people. Our own ways are the only ways that should matter to us.
Evelyn Mandel
We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
William Styron
Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual you have an obligation to be one.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Education should be the process of helping everyone to discover his uniqueness.
Leo Buscaglia
I was raised to sense what someone wanted me to be and be that kind of person. It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else's eyes.
Sally Field
Let the world know you as you are not as you think you should be because sooner or later if you are posing you will forget the pose and then where are you?
Fanny Brice
I will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
Lillian Hellman
She lacks confidence she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.
Anaïs Nin
Let me listen to me and not to them.
Gertrude Stein
It is possible to be different and still be all right.
Anne Wilson Schaef
Any path is only a path and there is no affront to oneself or to others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you.
Carlos Castañeda
Our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is whimsical sentimental irresponsibility and when it is a valid expression of our deepest desires and values.
Helen Merrell Lynd
The highest courage is to dare to appear to be what one is.
John Lancaster Spalding
Theories are like scaffolding: they are not the house but you cannot build the house without them.
Constance Fenimore Woolson
Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.
Janis Joplin
Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity.
Erich Fromm
It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself.
Thomas Paine
I think God rarely gives to one man or one set of men more than one great moral victory to win.
Lucy Stone
Every human being is intended to have a character of his own to be what no others are and to do what no other can do.
William Ellery Channing
Man has no nobler function than to defend the truth.
Mahalia Jackson
Misfortunes occur only when a man is false.... Events circumstances etc. have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Henry David Thoreau