ARTS
Mom:
I sorry, Honey, you can’t do both.
An
artist is someone who has learned to trust in himself. (Ludwig van Beethoven)
Art
is either plagiarism or revolution. (Paul Gauguin)
I
have had a very thin time of it these days. My money ran out on Thursday, and I
have lived for four days on twenty-three cups of coffee. (Vincent van Gogh)
Art
is by nature optimistic. Art is optimistic because it is alive. (Patti Smith)
The
composer Stravinsky had written a new piece with a difficult violin passage.
After it had been in rehearsal for several weeks, the solo violinist came to
Stravinsky and said he was sorry, he had tried his best, the passage was too
difficult, no violinist could play it. Stravinsky said, “I understand that.
What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it.” (Thomas Powers)
After
silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
(Aldous Huxley)
I
don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to. (Elvis Presley)
He
who sings scares away his woes. (Spanish Proverb)
What
do Fellini’s films have to do with naturalism? He works with the inaccuracies
of memory. It’s the opposite direction from naturalism: elevating things to
mythical, archetypal status. Make them more dreamlike. That’s a feeling I like
a lot. (Brian Eno)
First
thoughts are the strongest. (Allen Ginsberg)
My
books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.
(Mark Twain)
How
is a drum solo like a sneeze?…You can tell it’s coming, but you can’t do
anything about it.
This
urge to make everything profound. What nonsense! (Henry Miller)
How
many poets does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Two.:
One to curse the darkness, and one to light a candle.
I have come to
believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as
there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the
arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. (John Steinbeck)
I
don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things. (Henry Matisse)
Making
the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely
simple, that’s creative. (Charles Mingus)
Information
is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not
beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best. (Frank Zappa)
“I
used to drive out to John’s house,” says Paul McCartney. “He lived out in the
country, and I lived in London. I remember asking the chauffeur once if he was
having a good week. He said, ‘I’m very busy at the moment. I’ve been working
eight days a week.’ And I thought, ‘Eight days a week! Now there’s a title.’”
Charles
Dickens walks into a bar and orders a martini. The bartender asks, “Olive or
Twist?”
Give
me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day. (Samuel Goodwyn)
I
hate flowers. I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t
move. (Georgia O’Keefe)
Tuba
Player: Did you hear my last recital?
Friend:
I hope so.
For
a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I get
lucky and write better than I can. (Ernest Hemingway)
A
person from Boston took a Zen Buddhist monk to hear the Boston Symphony perform
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. His comment was, “Not enough silence.”
Art
should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
(Oscar Wilde)
Interviewer:
Some people say they can’t understand your writing even after they read it two
or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?
William
Faulkner: Read it four times.
To
say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is
the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most
people can’t eat it. (Leo Tolstoy)
What
is art but a way of seeing? (Saul Bellow)
It
takes a very good drummer to be better than no drummer at all. (Chet Baker)
Two
girls are walking through the forest when they come upon a talking frog. “Kiss
me and I will turn into a famous jazz musician,” says the frog.
The
first girl picks him up and puts him in her pocket.
“How come you didn’t kiss him?” says the
other girl.
“He’ll be worth more as a talking frog,” says
the first.
Artistic
growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of
truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist,
the great artist, knows how difficult it is. (Willa Cather)
If
I miss one day of practice, I can tell. Two days: the critics can tell. Three
days: the public can tell. (Yascha Heifitz)
Having
your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon
cubes. (John le Carre)
Did
you hear about the tenor who was so arrogant that the other tenors noticed?
George
Bernard Shaw telegram to Winston Churchill: “Sending you two opening night
tickets to my new play. Bring a friend if you have one.” Winston Churchill to
Shaw: “Unable to come on opening night. Will come 2nd night, if you
have one.”
Those
who wish to sing always find a song. (Swedish Proverb)
If
it sounds good, it is good. (Duke
Ellington)
There
are no wrong notes…only wrong resolutions. (Dizzy Gillespie)
Miles
Davis (on how to begin a solo): Think of a note…then don’t play it.
When
composer Igor Stravinsky was fifty-seven, he settled in the United States and a
year later decided to apply for American citizenship. He made an appointment to
see the appropriate official. At his first interview the official asked the
famous composer his name. “Stra-vin-sky,” he replied, speaking each syllable
distinctly. “You could change it, you know,” suggested the official. (Bartlett’s
Book of Anecdotes)
Where
words fail, music speaks. (Hans Christian Anderson)
The
music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic highway
where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a
negative side. (Hunter S. Thompson)
How
many producers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?...I don’t know…what do you
think?
The
great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes
inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled
down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant
settles down each day to his figures. They didn’t waste time waiting for
inspiration. (Ernest Newman)
How
many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?...Two: One to hold the
giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.
What’s
the difference between an accordion and an onion?…Nobody cries when you chop up
an accordion.
All
the sounds of the earth are like music. (Oscar Hammerstein)
There
are no dull subjects, there are only dull writers. (H. L. Mencken)
That’s
not writing, that’s typing. (Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac)
I
decided to start anew---to strip away what I had been taught, to accept as true
my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one
around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything
about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my
own, unknown---no one to satisfy but myself. I began with charcoal and paper
and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to
do in black and white. I believe it was June before I needed blue. (Georgia
O’Keefe)
There’s
no money in poetry…but then there’s no poetry in money, either. (Robert Graves)
Amateurs
emulate. Pros steal. (Author unknown)
I
knew a one-armed piano player once…It took him two minutes to play “The Minute
Waltz.”
What’s
the difference between a trumpet and a trombone?…You can make more belt-buckles
out of a trombone.
I
perhaps owe having become a painter to the flowers. (Claude Monet)
When
I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I
lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave,
and I call it breathing. (Anais Nin)
You
want to make money in the music business?...sell band uniforms. (Andre Previn)
Art
is a luxury for which the artist pays. (David Smith-sculptor)
Church
for accordion players…Our Lady of Spain.
Television
has raised writing to a new low. (Samuel Goldwyn)
You
never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
(Saul Bellow)
After
a concert, a fan rushed up to famed violinist Fritz Kreisler and gushed: “I’d
give my life to play as beautifully as you do.” Kreisler replied, “I did.”
Things
are beautiful if you love them. (Jean Anouilh)
Shelly
Manne, famous jazz drummer, was once in a serious car accident. As he was being
hurried to ER on a gurney, the attendant asked, “Is there anything you can’t take?”
Shelley replied, “Country music.”
Never
judge a book by it’s movie. (J.W. Eagan)
It
is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and
probing when every 12 minutes one is interrupted by 12 dancing rabbits singing
about toilet paper. (Rod Serling)
An
intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and
not think of The Lone Ranger. (Dan Rather)
You
can’t wait for inspiration. You must go after it with a club. (Jack London)
Wagner’s
music is better than it sounds. (Mark Twain)
Man
is not on the earth solely for his own happiness. He is there to realize great
things for humanity. (Vincent Van Gogh)
A
story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end…but not necessarily in that
order. (Jean Luc Goddard)
The
amount of money one needs is terrifying. (Ludwig Van Beethoven)
You
can’t possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh and go slow.
(Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket)
PATIENT:
Doc, you’ve got to help me! Every time I drive down a country lane, I find
myself singing ‘Green Green Grass Of Home.’ Every time I see a cat I sing
‘What’s New Pussycat?’ And last night I sang ‘Delilah’ in my sleep. I tell you,
Doc, my wife was not at all amused.
DOCTOR:
I wouldn’t worry. It seems you have the early symptoms of Tom Jones syndrome.
PATIENT:
I have never heard of that. Is it common?
DOCTOR:
It’s not unusual.
General
Custer and an Indian scout are on top of a hill overlooking Little Big Horn,
when they start to hear drums in the distance. General Custer says, “I don’t
like the sound of those drums.” The Indian scout listens for a second and says,
“That’s not their regular drummer.”
If
you create from the heart, nearly everything works: if from the head, almost
nothing. (Marc Chagall)
There
are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
(W. Somerset Maugham)
All
the inspiration I ever needed was a phone call from a producer. (Cole Porter)
If
Isaac Stern tries to play every piece ever composed for the violin, would he
leave no tone un-Sterned?
Opera
is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.
(Robert Benchley)
Everything
has beauty, but not everyone sees it. (Confucius)
Never
look at the trombones, it only encourages them. (Richard Strauss)
Over
the years I have discovered that ideas come through an intense desire for them;
continually desiring, the mind becomes a watchtower on the lookout for
incidents that may excite the imagination. (Charlie Chaplin)
We
are not here to do what has already been done. (Robert Henri)
CLASSIFIED
AD: “Apt. for rent: 3 br., deposit, lease. No poets.”
Students
in a Harvard English 101 class were asked to write a concise essay containing
four elements: religion, royalty, sex and mystery. The only A+ in the class
read: “My God,” said the Queen, “I’m pregnant! I wonder who did it.”
An
idea comes as close to something for nothing as you can get. (Robert Frost)
1
million microphones=1 megaphone
The
difference between the right word and almost the right word is like the
difference between lightning and the lightning bug. (Mark Twain)
A
writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other
people. (Thomas Mann)
Everybody
has talent at 25. The difficult thing is to have it at 50. (Edgar Degas)
The
most important thing to succeed in show business is sincerity. And if you can
fake that, you’ve got it made. (George Burns)
How
many altos does it take to screw in a lightbulb?...One to climb the ladder and
the rest to complain about how high it is.
What’s
the difference between a soprano and a rotweiller?...Jewelry.
“My
first real joke was in the fourth-grade talent show. My friend Joel wrapped
himself up in bandages like a mummy and held a sign that read ‘400 B.C.’ I said
that was the license plate of the car that ran over him.” (Jay Leno)
Inspiration
only knocks. Some writers expect it to break down the door and pull them out of
bed. (Leonard Bernstein)
Music
is spiritual. The music business is not. (Van Morrison)
The
eccentric American composer, John Cage, is responsible for composing the sheet
music for his extremely quiet Opus “4 Minutes, 33 Seconds,” which is exactly
that much silence. The sheet music is blank and just tells you how long not to
play.
Last
year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught
every other fish. (Steven Wright)
I hold that a
writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no
dedication nor any membership in literature. (John Steinbeck)
I’ll
play it first and tell you what it is later. (Miles Davis)
Music
is the shorthand of emotion. (Leo Tolstoy)
The
most popular form of transportation in the music business is the bandwagon.
(David Hopper)
Among
the many forms in which human spirit has tried to express its innermost
yearnings and perceptions, music is perhaps the most universal.
It
symbolizes the yearning for harmony, with oneself and others, with nature and
the spiritual and the sacred within us and around us.
There
is something in music that transcends and unites. This is evident in the sacred
music of every community…music that expresses the universal yearning that is
shared by people all over the globe. (Dalai Lama)
Our
good time is sitting in a coffee shop with a newspaper, writing a line on the
back of a napkin. That is the most fun comedians ever have. (Jerry Seinfeld)
I’m
writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done. (Steven Wright)
Music
is the meeting place of the tangible and the intangible. (Yehudi Mehnuin)
Sign
on a music teacher’s door: “Out Chopin, Bach in a minuet.”
Audiences
like their blues singers to be miserable. (Janis Joplin)
It
is said that no word in the English language rhymes with: month, orange, silver
or purple.
I
like talking about ideas. I find them terribly interesting. (Brian Eno)
Les
Paul, the great guitarist, was asked in an interview with Pat Martino (also a
great guitarist): Do you have any guidelines for guitar players? He replied,
“Can your Mom recognize your playing over the radio?”
To play a wrong note is insignificant; to
play without passion is inexcusable. (Beethoven)
You
can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. (Maya Angelou)