Quotes by British Authors - Page 585

Led Zeppelin created their music from a diet of Bert Jansch, Memphis Minnie, John Fahey, Billy Fury, Phil Spector, Richard 'Rabbit' Brown, Moby Grape, Manitas De Plata and Om Kalsoum. Those who came afterwards were content with a diet of Led Zeppelin, which is not the same thing at all.
David Hepworth
And then the great music of which the world is made took him over, beyond thought, beyond control until he heard her cry his name and they fell together off the edge of the world.
Jean Gill
I didn't say much; my head was still ringing with the music, and I didn't want it to fade. I kept thinking back to it, the way that Will's friend had been so lost in what he was playing. I hadn't realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn't predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.
Jojo Moyes
...the sole test of music is its power to exalt the soul.
Aleister Crowley
Puzzle pieces, people and their gifts seek to fit instay true to yourself; don't cram or trim.
James Valentine
When there is nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.
Torquil Campbell
A sad, plangent music. In the British camp, Sharpe thought, they would be singing, but no one was singing here.
Bernard Cornwell
This is how early age people heard music, not through their ears above the cacophony of modern life but directly from the universe into their souls.
Bryan Islip
Everything sings, the whole universe and all the other universes. It's in our genes, see, not just in our ears.
Bryan Islip
Everything about you resonates happinessNo I won't settle for less
Muse
Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible. [on hearing a famous violinist]
Samuel Johnson
The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they'd be avaliable to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.
David Byrne
The online music magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos.
David Byrne
Music written by teams makes the authorship of a piece indistinct. Could it be that when hearing a song written by a team, a listener can sense that they aren't hearing an expression of a solitary individual's pain or joy, but that of a virtual conjoined person? Can we tell that an individual singer might actually represent a collective, that he might have multiple identities? Does that make the sentiments expressed more poetically universal? Dan eliminating some portion of the authorial voice make a piece of music more accessible and the singer more empathetic?
David Byrne
Any kid will tell you that, yes, their music is both an escape and a survival mechanism, and that sometimes the music givesbthem hope and inspiration. It doesn't just placate and pacify.
David Byrne
Innocent and joyfulI take your handfor I know you judge not,you simply understand.You are my companionon this voyage of discovery,singing sweet soft musicto the universe inside of me.
Jay Woodman
Music — good music, great music — had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses’ ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.
Julian Barnes
You might say that the universe plays the blues.
David Byrne
Presuming that there is such a thing as "progress" when it comes to music, and that music is "better" now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn't "improve.
David Byrne
In the early days, I might have gotten on stage and begun to sing as a desperate attempt to communicate, but now I found that singing was both a physical and emotional joy. It was sensuous, a pure pleasure, which didn't take away from the emotions being expressed—even if they were melancholic. Music can do that; you can enjoy singing about something sad.
David Byrne
Recordings aren't time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it's morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can "get into" clubs virtually, "sit" in concert halls you can't afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don't understand, about lives that are alien, sad, or wonderful. Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context.
David Byrne
Ah, music, a magic beyond all we do here.
J.K. Rowling
The Beatles were bubblegum cards and Help at the Saturday morning cinema and toy plastic guitars and singing 'Yellow Submarine' at the top of my voice in the back row of the coach on school trips. They belong to me, not to me and Laura, or me and Charlie, or me and Alison Ashworth, and though they'll make me feel something, they won't make me feel anything bad.
Nick Hornby
Keith Richards is a man without regret. When I ask him if—given the chance to do it all over again—he’d start taking heroin, he doesn’t pause. “Oh yes. Yes. There was a lot of experience in there—you meet a lot of weird people, different takes on life that you’re not going to find if you don’t go there. I loved a good high. And if you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses, because they’re asleep. There’s songs zooming around everywhere. There’s songs zooming through here right now, in the air.
Caitlin Moran
There is no dark side of the moon really. As a matter of fact it's all dark.
Pink Floyd
Suddenly high song awakens me, and I leave all this tedious routine far, far distant; I listen, till all the world is changed, and the beautiful earth becomes more beautiful.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Music is like a psychiatrist. You can tell your guitar things that you can't tell people. And it will answer you with things people can't tell you.
Paul McCartney
You won't enjoy it," sighed Crowley. "It's been in the car for more than a fortnight." A heavy bass beat began to thump through the Bentley as they sped past Heathrow. Aziraphale's brow furrowed. "I don't recognize this," he said. "What is it?" "It's Tchaikovsky's 'Another One Bites the Dust'," said Crowley, closing his eyes as they went through Slough. To while away the time as they crossed the sleeping Chilterns, they also listened to William Byrd's "We Are the Champions" and Beethoven's "I Want To Break Free." Neither were as good as Vaughan Williams's "Fat-Bottomed Girls.
Terry Pratchett
It does not need to be perfect - or technically correct - to be magic
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Bowie talks in great, voluble torrents, darting from one topic to the next, parenthesizing and then parenthesizing the parentheses, as if he has too many ideas for one conversation.
Sean Egan
Yeah, you and me, we can ride on a starIf you stay with me, girlWe can rule the worldYeah, you and me, we can light up the skyIf you stay by my sideWe can rule the world
Neil Gaiman
There are eighty-eight keys on a piano and within that, an entire universe.
James Rhodes
No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back,' breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end.
E.M. Forster
Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.
G.K. Chesterton
I was once asked to pick a couple of records for an interview I was doing on Radio 2. I picked one by Will Oldham and one by Joanna Newsome. Someone on the production phoned me to say that I couldn't have either record because they were 'too alternative' and I could just pick two from their playlist. Now, personally, I think that Radio 2's listeners would dig both Joanna Newsome and Will Oldham if they heard their records, and that the fact they don't get to hear them contributes to the cultural wasteland we live in. I told them that I'd been to see Joanna Newsome in the Albert Hall a couple of weeks before and it had been sold out. How could she be 'too alternative'? 'Alternative' and 'mainstream' aren't strictly to do with whether things are popular or minority interest. They are ideological labels. Someone like Joe Pasquale would be called 'mainstream' and regularly pops up on TV, but would play the smaller end of the touring-theatre circuit. If Joanna Newsome can sell out Albert Hall, why can't she get played on Radio 2? I would agree that it's because her work is too layered, challenging and interesting. Think about that. What you get to hear about is filtered, and not filtered to get rid of useless cunts like Joe Pasquale, but of things that might enrich your life.
Frankie Boyle
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
I was once asked to pick a couple of records for an interview I was doing on Radio 2. I picked one by Will Oldham and one by Joanna Newsom. Someone on the production phoned me to say that I couldn't have either record because they were 'too alternative' and I could just pick two from their playlist. Now, personally, I think that Radio 2's listeners would dig both Joanna Newsom and Will Oldham if they heard their records, and that the fact they don't get to hear them contributes to the cultural wasteland we live in. I told them that I'd been to see Joanna Newsom in the Albert Hall a couple of weeks before and it had been sold out. How could she be 'too alternative'? 'Alternative' and 'mainstream' aren't strictly to do with whether things are popular or minority interest. They are ideological labels. Someone like Joe Pasquale would be called 'mainstream' and regularly pops up on TV, but would play the smaller end of the touring-theatre circuit. If Joanna Newsom can sell out Albert Hall, why can't she get played on Radio 2? I would agree that it's because her work is too layered, challenging and interesting. Think about that. What you get to hear about is filtered, and not filtered to get rid of useless cunts like Joe Pasquale, but of things that might enrich your life.
Frankie Boyle
Playing in an orchestra is completely different to playing on my own.Sometimes I played, sometimes listened; instead of waiting my turn, I sometimes interrupted another player, sometimes I argued, sometimes agreed.My flute is my mouthpiece and I felt as if I was actually joining in a conversation.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
I don't think I knew what depression was. I knew I felt funny sometimes and I was different. I think it's a musician thing. That's why I write music. You know, I'm not like some messed up person. There is a lot of people that suffer depression that don't have an outlet, you know what I mean? That can't pick up a guitar for an hour and feel better.
Amy Winehouse
Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.
Julian Barnes
He quickly observed, that good sentences and excellent representations of the follies of mankind met with little regard or applause, whilst sounds, without sense, threw every body into raptures:——but 'twas the fashion of the day to be musically mad, and those who were absurd enough to prefer a rational entertainment to a flimsy opera, were poor insipid beings, without taste or enthusiasm.
Eliza Parsons
Written in pain, written in aweBy a puzzled man who questionedWhat we were here for
David Bowie
It was a real party of swells.
Elvis Costello
I'm sitting here doing nothing but ageing while my guitar gently weeps
George Harrison
We love music deeply, but why? Put simply: music makes lives, shapes lives, expresses all shades and stages of life - and even saves lives.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Sometimes the magic of life is beyond thought. It's the sparkle of intuition, of bringing your own personal energy into your music.
Jennifer Ryan
They were making a riotous noise, but it was much more like music - rather advanced music which you don't quite take in at the first hearing - than birds' songs ever are in our world.
C.S. Lewis
The Pythagoreans... were fascinated by certain specific ratios, ...The Greeks knew these as the 'golden' proportion and the 'perfect' proportion respectively. They may well have been learned from the Babylonians by Pythagoras himself after having been taken prisoner in Egypt. Ratios lay at the heart of the Pythagorean theory of music.
Graham Flegg
...and for a great deal it seemed good to him, for in the music there were no flaws.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I am you and what I see is me
Pink Floyd
Jazz was about the spaces between notes. It was about what happened when you listened to the thing inside you. The gaps and the cracks. Because that was where life really happened, when you were brave enough to free-fall.
Rachel Joyce
No daydreaming. No music, film, art, creative thinking or business.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Plenty of masterpieces are just one cliché after another, Mozart for example, but that's quite natural, because if you think about it, two clichés that have never met each other before can beget the most original and profound effect.
Thomas Ades
If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.
Keith Richards
After reading someone you love, wait at least an hour before starting to write
Matty Healy
But everyone has a voice, and everyone sings. Oh, we all do it differently. Some of us sing quietly, alone, only in the dead of night or in the shower. Some of us sing a cappella, and some stand on a stage beside a band and let the whole world share their song. Some of us, some of us don’t sing at all, like that. We sing with other instruments: There’s song in stores, and in art, and in getting up before the dawn and putting food onto the table. There are angry songs and sad songs and songs that make you want to dance. But everybody has a song to sing, their own personal story leaked into the world. And mine is one of love.
Fox Benwell
Music does that; I would often dawdle home to make it last, all calm and wide awake and bouncing-still, and music would be everywhere, in everything.
Fox Benwell
Music is obsession.Like jumping in a river and getting swept away, too fast, too hard, hoping that you find an eddy somewhere that will let you gasp for air.
Fox Benwell
Music is the real life. Everything else is just mortar.
Fox Benwell
There’s always music. Everywhere.
Fox Benwell