"The way you change and help music is by tryin' to invent new ways to play"
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"That was my gift . . . having the ability to put certain guys together that would create a chemistry and then letting them go; letting them play what they knew, and above it."
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"It's like creating an artificial loop saying, 'You didn't play the game the way I wanted you to play, so now you're punished and you're going to come back and play it again until you do what I want you to do.' In an action game, I can get that – why not? It's all about skills. But in a story-driven experience it doesn't make any sense."
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"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."
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"[Sunbathing nude] was a liberating experience. It felt unbelievably crazy to take off all my clothes and play in the sun. I've not had that much fun in so long."
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"Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues."
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"The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle."
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"I always knew that someone was going to come at me with a script to play God. It's just one of those things, the way your career is unfolding and all the talk about gravitas etc etc, so I had a strong feeling that someone was going to offer me the part of God. I was totally prepared to say, 'Thanks but no thanks,' unless it was a comedy."
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"When you deal with a man, deal with his most valuable possession, his life. There's play and there's the deep flow. I like to take things to the deep flow of play, because everything is a game, serious and nonserious at the same time. So play life like it's a game."
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"Sometimes I like to play the soundtracks to famous musicals so we can all sing along. South Pacific is one of my favorites. Our neighbors must hate us."
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"Each of us plays four roles in relation to the brain. We lead, we inspire, we invent, and we use it. Most people do not actively use their brains. They passively let their feelings and thoughts control their lives. They don't invent new ways to use their brains, either, settling instead for the same routine and repetitive thoughts every day. But if you master all four roles, you create your super brain. When you are the active observer of your feelings and thoughts, you become the user of your brain. Your super brain then serves you, not vice versa."
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"I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That's when I was born."
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"Play is a child's work and this is not a trivial pursuit."
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"Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!"
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"As long as life has the level of being a game, you can play it."
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"The happiest people are those who have learned to mix play with their work and to bind the two together with enthusiasm."
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"We are the space in which thoughts appear, play, and dissolve like clouds drifting in the infinite sky."
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"Life is a game, play it."
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"I always liked the steel guitar. I also love the guys that play the bottleneck. But I could never do it; I never made it do what I want. So every time I would pick up the guitar, I'd shake my hand and trill it a bit. For some strange reason my ears would say to me that sounds similar to what those guys were doing. I can't pick up the guitar now without doing it. So that's how I got into making my sound. It was nothing pretty. Just trying to please myself. I heard that sound."
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"I think Ive done the best I could have done. But I keep wanting to play better, go further. There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I havent yet done. When I was younger I thought maybe Id reached that peak. But Im 86 now, and if I make it through to next month, Ill be 87. And now I know it can never be perfect, it can never be exactly what it should be, so you got to keep going further, getting better."
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