Top 1200 Great Musician Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

Any musician who can stop may be a musician, but they're no artist. If it's in your blood, it can't stop flowing.

Playing the Opry, when I get the opportunity - it's one of the coolest honors for any musician in any genre, but especially for a country musician.

To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.

There was a very famous musician in our family. He was a great violinist, an internationally known teacher. He was Leopold Auer.

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.

I'm kind of a terrible musician. I'm a very functional musician. I play just about every instrument in a band setting, functionally. But I should not be taking solos.

I know I'm always going to be a musician, for the rest of my life. That's for sure. It's about how you balance between being a musician and being a parent, and making it intertwined.

I've always thought about myself as somewhat of a folk musician. I just write words. I don't think I'm even a musician. I don't play a lot of instruments, not really a soloist or anything.

I wouldn't buy somebody's album on a dare if they called him a musician's musician. I don't write to be a writer's writer. I don't want to be like the little-magazine writer.

I feel like a part of my role being a musician and part of why I want to be a musician is to show women an alternative to sort of the cultural norms, the stereotypes of what we're supposed to be, demure and quiet and motherly.

I started as a musician. I play the saxophone, but from the age of 17, I realised that it's very hard to make a living as a jazz musician in Australia. So I went for an audition and got an acting job and, fortunately, I completely fell in love with that.

To me, seeing a really great comedian is a bit like watching a musician or a poet.

That's my contribution - running a sound, healthy company that serves millions of customers well and employs hundreds of thousands of people. What else am I going to do? I'm not an artist. I'm not a writer. I'm not a musician. I'd love to be a tennis player or musician. I'm not.

I don't want to be a musician's musician. I want to be an everyone's musician.

Slowly, over time, I learned enough that I started considering myself a musician, where I actually knew how to play instruments. But still, when I talk to my real musician friends, they're calling chords out, and I have no idea what they're talking about.

I don't consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can't develop any further. But I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. Take a musician like John Coltrane. He is a perfect musician, who can give expression to all the possibilities of his instrument. But he seems to have difficulty expressing original ideas on it. That is why he keeps looking for ideas in exotic places. At least I don't have that problem, because, like I say, I find my inspiration in myself.

I don't think my skill level is up there as a musician. I think I'm best at writing in general. The musicians that I know are really good, and I feel like I have a lot to do until I become a musician.

The sound was my greatest concern. There were certain difficulties getting used to the way every musician can hear his or herself, the way each of them relates to the musician in the next seat.

My job of being a musician in a recording studio has nothing to do with being a musician being on tour performing.

Kenny Burrell is a great musician and his music has helped to make me what I am today.

If you truly have expertise - and expertise can be say a chess master who has really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you know if you give a jazz musician.

It's rare that I ever meet a musician who doesn't agree that music is a language. But it's very rare to meet a musician that really treats it like one.

I knew a gentleman that I had worked with over the years, who is no longer with us, and was a great influence in my life named Cachao - a Cuban musician, composer, arranger, and creator of the Mambo. The integrity of the journey is what's important - how you conduct yourself in the process. That's what Cachao was always about. He had great integrity, great dignity, was very humble, and dedicated to his art.

The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.

As a musician and a guitar player, I can noodle as well as anybody. But from my background as a session musician, I always try to play what is called for by the lyric and listening to the song. As a writer, that's what I do, too.

I think I turned to writing really just to wake up in the morning and be a musician and to have something to do, and feel like a musician every day even if I wasn't working.

I'm lazy. I don't practice enough. I do other stuff. I'm not a musician's musician, and I don't necessarily know if I want to be. When I hear something and want to work on it, then that's what my project will be.

The world has lost a great musician who will always be an inspiration to me and those at OBEY GIANT.

You had to have a great voice or talent as a musician before imaging or marketing plans came into play.

I was at a time of my life of making choices, I suppose: am I a writer, am I a visual artist? And when I was a teenager. I thought I would be a film-maker. Am I a musician? If so, what kind of musician am I?

If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

When I went off to college, I was expecting to be a concert musician. In music school I heard all of these kids who were just unbelievable. And I understand that you can be very, very good, but there's something that separates very, very good from great, and I knew that I wasn't great.

I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

I know I’m an African-American, and I know I play the saxophone, but I’m not a jazz musician. I’m not a classical musician, either. My music is like my life: It’s in between these areas.

I didn't get into music to become a blues musician, or a country musician. I'm a singer-songwrit er. In my book that means I get to do whatever I want.

Being a musician - it's easier for me to date an athlete. There's too much competition [with a musician]. There's too much know-it-all pop star.

Once you lose that musician part -not just the playing, I'm talking about musician attitude- then you're lost, man. Especially if you started out that way. It feels so good to be back, starting from the ground up.

The music that I play is much more accepted in America. Do you know what I mean? Americans recognize and not necessarily country music. I go to a lot of places in Canada and they go "I don't like country music" and they think I'm a country musician. When I am a country musician but not a country musician like they think of.

Thank God I'm a horrible musician. Good singer, horrible musician.

It is not a dreamlike state, but the somehow insulated state, that a great musician achieves in a great performance. He's aware of where he is and what he's doing, but his mind is on the playing of his instrument with an internal sense of rightness - it is not merely mechanical, it is not only spiritual; it is something of both, on a different plane and a more remote one.

I don't think I have an image of being an underground musician. I have an image of being an uncompromising musician, and I am well known in Norway partly because of that.

I think I'm an okay parent, but I'd put myself in the category of a musician-who-happened-to-become-a-father. I'm definitely not a father-who-happened-to-be-a-musician.

There's something really natural to me about being what they call in the business a "hyphenate." Being a musician-actor or writer-musician-actor.

I don't consider myself to be a great musician, but my first album was a record hit in Pakistan.

I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.

I have a great deal of respect for myself as a musician and a writer, even if I'm not doing it anymore.

If you ever ask me what my all-time dream character is, my answer will be Mia Tansen, the great composer-musician in Hindustani classical music. And ideally, the film should be directed by a person like Bhansali who is a great director and has a marvellous sense of classical music.

To be honest, I don't necessarily think you have to be an actor to act. You don't have to be a musician to make great music. If it comes along and you put your all into it, the outcome is what's important.

I knew nothing of the real life of a musician, but I seemed to see myself standing in front of great crowds of people, playing my accordion.

Dude, if you want to be a great musician, you have to try heroin. You'll see. It's like being back in the womb.

Music has always been my first love, and I appreciate how a great musician can bring awareness to tough issues through their work.

Obviously, [Wham!] made me a lot more comfortable as a musician. I was very confident that I would become a successful musician, but I had no idea I would be a celebrity.

Being a musician - and I like to think of myself as a musician with a capital M - you need to be an omnivore, and I think the best musicians will listen to anything and love everything, and I do.

Once a musician, always a musician.

I'm a mother, and that's really important. Today, the mother and the musician can sit next to each other. Even when the musician is out there in full swing, the mother doesn't get switched off.

I have a musician friend who, after reading Mountains, told me, "When I read the book, I wanted to quit music altogether and become a doctor." I told him, "Do you really think you can be a better doctor than you are a musician? Nobody needs you as a lousy doctor. Just be the one-of-a-kind, brilliant musician you are, and divert your success somehow to benefit the poor." You can achieve so much more this way.

My dad wasn't the biggest role model, but he was a great musician and I loved him very much. He was a character.

I want them to come away with discovering the music inside them. And not thinking about themselves as jazz musicians, but thinking about themselves as good human beings, striving to be a great person and maybe they'll become a great musician.

I didn't get into music to become a blues musician, or a country musician. I'm a singer-songwriter. In my book that means I get to do whatever I want.

My dad was a professional musician; my mom played, too, but just for fun. All my siblings played. The house was full of music books, videos, albums. I guess it's not surprising that I ended up becoming a musician.