Quote collection
93 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You gotta learn the alphabet, backwards and forwards. And then the choice is yours, 'cause last I looked, the Bible is written in the same words, the exact same alphabet, as my favorite pornography. Choice is yours."
"The only thing I'm allergic to is criticism."
"I live and breathe and do four times as much four times as fast as anyone else."
"You know what rock musicians are? They are hung up, neurotic, over-weight hippies with sex problems."
"Being a rock star is being a rock star, I don't need to go into the details. What would you do if you were a rock star?"
"Music videos are like girlfriends. I'm constantly amazed on what other people doing"
"You can really bring so much more to rock'n'roll. Rock'n'roll is the most accepting, is the most fertile ground for creating hybrid forms of music and hybrid forms of show, if you draw from many, many different wells. It's just unfortunate so many rock'n'roll stars only bother to learn how to play like Led Zeppelin and/or the Rolling Stones and that's what you get, disc after disc and show after show."
"Nobody's going to get a hot dog at my concert!"
"When you get something like MTV, it's like regular television. You get it, and at first it's novel and brand new and then you watch every channel, every show. And then you become a little more selective and more selective, until ultimately... you wind up with a radio."
"You want to know if we're animals? When I'm on stage with the volume rippling my body like a glass of water and thousands of people are generating heat in my direction, there's no time for thought. My basement facilities take over completely. Sure it's animal. People might like to talk about art, but look where art is, in the gutter."
"My ambition is to further create a signature sound, a signature spirit, that makes some kind of contribution to music in general."
"Nine times out of 10 when people do a tribute album or tribute songs for somebody, it's what I call 'white boys playing reggae'. They know they can't, we know they can't, so they sing like they can't and play like they can't. They gently make fun of the idiom or sing in a false accent."
"I grew up on radio, not TV."
"In the United States, you can put on a cowboy hat and join the country-western neighborhood. If you're down below 14th Street in New York City, that's bohemian; that's left-wing."
"Somebody asked me the question not too long ago: 'Dave, do you think the music business has turned corrupt.' I said: 'Absolutely not - it has always been corrupt.'"
"You want a hero in the music world? James Brown. He brought a feeling to music without really using words. He's just famous for his sound."
"I believe more and more that this business is about people. People, people. The idea is to make friends at the retail level, the warehouse level, let people see you exist, can form sentences and have an interest in something other than yourself."
"Critics like Elvis Costello because critics are like Elvis Costello."
"Whether I'm on for a day or whether I'm on for a year, at the end of the day, I sing for my dinner."
"I knew already when I was seven years old, that I wanted to be on stage and entertain people. I sell laughs. Here, you got one for free!"