Top 28 Quotes & Sayings by John Lurie

I guess I just want everything to be available immediately.

I play music, I paint - these things come from your depths.

I had a mystical experience when I was in my late teens, early 20s, and I spent years trying to recapture that.

Kenny G is not real jazz. I don't even think Wynton Marsalis is real jazz. I don't think Harry Connick Jr. is real jazz. If there is such a thing as real jazz, The Lounge Lizards is real jazz, Henry Threadgill is real jazz, Bill Frisell is real jazz, you know?

I've been through this fame thing before, when the band was big in '80, '81.

I remember seeing McCoy Tyner in concert, and thinking that the music was incredible, but wanting to be invited in. I figured that humor was the way of letting the audience in. I've gotten a hard time about it, but I love to be funny onstage.

Acting scares me.

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.

My musical education started in the limelight, because I found myself surrounded by real musicians, but after my career had taken off.

When I first got sick, they told me I had a year to live, and I was writing my memoir really fast. There were really weird things happening with my nervous system and my heart and stuff, and it didn't look like I was gonna make it, so I was writing really fast, and then I couldn't write anymore.

If someone who knows what's going on comes up and says they liked the music, I appreciate that.

The thing with sculpture is, 90% of the time, when I pass a piece of sculpture, it's in public or somewhere, and it's just, how inconvenient that that's there. It takes up so much room, and it's so oppressive.

I'd always maintained an image so that people wouldn't approach me.

But, you know, I'd be happy just making music.

I've had encounters with animals that have been really mystical. I've always been really into animals. But the way they appear in the paintings, they come from my mind's eye more than: 'I'm gonna draw a dog now.' It isn't thought out: 'Now I'm gonna draw a bird.' They just appear.

I think humor is actually a very serious thing. I think the people who shaped culture, for the better, in the last 50 years or so, more than almost anyone else are people like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and even Chris Rock, back when he was doing the edgier stuff.

I start out making my paintings for me. I don't see it as a form of communication. Until, of course, after they are done and I want people to see them. And want them to be recognized. But while I am making them I just try to get lost in them. Kind of like it's a prayer.

The loss of music is very painful, and I don't revisit stuff unless there is a solid reason to do it.

The paintings usually start as abstracts and then I look at them and look at them, and like a Rorschach test, I try and see what it is.

I have an idea of a set of colors and see what I have. A lot of things, the best, more magical things in the paintings just sort of happen. They aren't things I thought of in advance. They are more things I am given. What paint does, in watercolor more than oil but it happens in oil too, are things one never expects if you work freely. I suppose I learned a lot coming to this after years of playing improvisational music. I have to trust my intuition and I work in the moment, when that moment seems to be happening. And to leave it alone when it is not.

I attempt to create a world that hypnotizes me as I make it. I hope others can get lost in it in the same way, but to be honest, I don't care that much. It isn't like a basketball player is out on the court hoping that people like the game of basketball as the game goes on. If people don't see it, they don't see it. It is a fragile thing and most people recognize that and respect it. Even if for whatever reason, they don't like the painting.

I don't really stay away from politics but the bullshit just gets to be too much. Any political tweets I take down after an hour or so. They are met with such a wall of stupidity and anger, it is hardly worth it to leave it up. Particularly, if you say anything about Hillary Clinton, the responses are just nuts - "YOU JUST FEAR SMART, STRONG WOMEN, MR. MAN".

When I was about 17 I knew that I was going to be serious about music. Before that I thought, fairly certainly, that I would be a writer. Before that, I thought I would be a forward in the NBA. And before that I thought that I would own a snake farm.

It seems like there are always gatekeepers. People between you and the people who are moved by your work. They often make a beautiful thing creepy.

I feel cleaner on the days where I am painting as opposed to the periods when I am not, that is certain to me. In a sense it is a transfiguration, what comes at me in my life or what I see going on in the world comes out as something beautiful or hopefully beautiful.

There are people clamoring for the election of Donald Trump because they hate anyone whose skin is a slight shade different than theirs. They are calling for the eradication of Islam and want to build a wall along an arbitrary line that keeps Mexicans out of the land they probably have more of a right to cross than the people who now somehow think they have a right to be there.

I think the Native Americans had the right idea about preserving and respecting the earth. Not just using it up. We are not the center of the universe and that we think we are will most likely be the end of us. Then nature will go on its way, with humans only being a faint ugly memory. And yes I am fond of animals or most of them.

What do you know about music, you're not a lawyer?