"I have seen great jazz musicians die obscure and drinking themselves to death and not really being able to get any work and working in small, funky jazz clubs."
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Musician quotes
Musician
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Musician quotes (page 6 of 68)
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"I guess I'm fortunate that I'm still around and I emphasize 'I guess', because you never can tell what musicians would be playing had they been around as long as I have."
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"There is nothing Holy about hatred."
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"I am not what I would consider truly a musician. I am an inventor. I am an innovator."
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"The first impulse of a great number of civilized musicians... is to protest ourdeclaration that the music in Hungary belongs to the Gypsies."
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"We need improvement in the style of performance. There is no more advantage in a musician who plays and conducts than in one who is only a beater of rhythm."
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"In other words, musicians know that going back to the Spoonful, what we were doing was not copying."
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"I know I'm a strong performer. I'm not an evolved musician."
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"As an artist, I never wanted to be fettered by gender nor recognized or defined as a female poet, musician or singer. They don't do that with men - nobody says Picasso, the male artist. Curators call me up and say, "We want your work to be in a show about women artists," and I'm like, why? For Christ's sake, do we have to attach a gender onto everything?"
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"The sexiest woman musician is Alicia Keys."
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"Touring is my favorite part of being a musician. All the places I've traveled and lived affect me in many different ways. Good and bad."
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"A musician cannot move others unless he, too, is moved."
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"For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo."
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"I knew I could never be accepted as a straight-ahead jazz musician, nor would Iaccept myself as that. I would never be accepted as a minimalist. I wouldn't be adowntown composer. Because I find all orthodoxies, all doctrines to be ultimatelybanal."
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"Break windows, smoke cigars, and stay up late. Tell 'em to do that, they'll find a little pot of gold."
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"I think musicians should stay off television generally. I get asked all the time. Those shows are just promoting insipid comedies. Who watches those shows? And whoever does I don't think my music would speak to those people. I don't even want those people to hear what I'm doing."
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"My only concern about art collaborations is that I never thought of myself as an Artist. My tax forms say Musician/Songwriter."
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"I was feeling privileged and self-conscious about my life as a musician, which feels self-absorbed. I can't help it, I am a musician. This is what I do."
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"You're a musician, it is important that you suffer!"
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"Music and visual performance have to influence each other. Designers and musicians have to be the nexus of all things pop culture, so I think about designers when I'm making music."
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