Musician Quotes

I'm a musician at heart, I know I'm not really a singer. I couldn't compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it. (Nat King Cole)
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet. View quote
Bob Dylan
As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note. View quote
Georges Bizet
The musician writes for the orchestra what his inner voice sings to him; the painter rarely relies without disadvantage solely upon the images which his inner eye presents to him; nature gives him his forms, study governs his combinations of them. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. View quote
Louis Armstrong
The theatre is not the place for the musician. When the curtain is up the music interrupts the actor, and when it is down the music interrupts the audience. View quote
Arthur Sullivan
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. View quote
Abraham Maslow
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Being a musician is what I do, but it's not what I am. View quote
Herbie Hancock
A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting. View quote
Charlie Trotter
The true musician is to bring light into people's hearts. (Bobby McFerrin)
There are things that I am very proud of and there are things that you are not so proud of. But I think that applies to any musician. View quote
Bill Wyman
If you want to be a doctor, a lawyer you must go to college. But if you want to be a musician or such, study your craft. Study music. View quote
Billy Eckstine
You can't fake this music. You might be a great singer or a great musician but, in the need, that's got nothing to do with it. It's how you connect to the songs and to the history behind them. View quote
Etta James
I don't spend a lot of time thinking of what they'll do musically, I try to imagine being locked into a windowless room with this person for twelve hours at a time. If you can look at that and think it might be fun then maybe you've got the right musician. View quote
Leo Kottke
I knew nothing of the real life of a musician, but I seemed to see myself standing in front of great crowds of people, playing my accordion. View quote
Lawrence Welk
Any musician who says he is playing better either on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain, straight liar. When I get too much to drink, I can't even finger well, let alone play decent ideas. You can miss the most important years of your life, the years of possible creation. View quote
Charlie Parker
Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music - that is the death of a musician. View quote
Georg Solti
The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
[A]ny musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch. View quote
Pierre Boulez
When we talk of architecture, people usually think of something static; this is wrong. What we are thinking of is an architecture similar to the dynamic and musical architecture achieved by the Futurist musician Pratella. Architecture is found in the movement of colours, of smoke from a chimney and in metallic structures, when they are expressed in states of mind which are violent and chaotic. (Carlo Carrà)
If a professional musician in a symphony orchestra is playing Beethoven. But this particular orchestra have played this particular chestnut so many times, they can play it in their sleep. Does the genius remain present in the music or not? View quote
Robert Fripp
I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning. View quote
Yo-Yo Ma
It's so funny being a Christian musician. It always scares me when people think so highly of Christian music, Contemporary Christian music especially. Because I kinda go, I know a lot of us, and we don't know jack about anything. Not that I don't want you to buy our records and come to our concerts. I sure do. But you should come for entertainment. If you really want spiritual nourishment, you should go to church...you should read the Scriptures. View quote
Rich Mullins
I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice. View quote
Wynton Marsalis