I cannot say what I think is right about music. I only know the rightness of it.

Musicians are always gigging and never have a chance to stop for a minute.

I cannot say what I think is right about music. I only know the rightness of it.

When you're up against an electric band like that, it's like you're on two separate planets.

I'm not talking ideas, or even presentation. It's like in politics: You have to sell something to become an electric player - like your skin or your heart.

We really never know what we're gonna play when we get on stage.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?

Once we're inside a tune, we can do anything with it.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

I don't like recording studios - except my own, which is just a little room above the garage.

I actually get a metallic taste in my mouth when I think about electric music.

I am a romantic, I admit it.

I can't even tolerate my own playing on electric keyboards. It's not about the musical ideas - the sound itself is toxic. It's like eating plastic broccoli.

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

I realized that improvisers should probably always have time off. But musicians are always gigging and never have a chance to stop for a minute - unless something drastic occurs.

I'm my own most merciless critic onstage.

If I'm not a jazz player all the time, I've at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

If a person plays dissonance long enough, it will sound like consonance. It's a language that was alien and then it's less and less alien as it continues to live.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

One thing you learn: if you want to reveal yourself, you also have to know where to stop.

The way I think about the practicing, it is my undercover work.

We accept so many things that come through the media; we get used to them, however vigilant we are. But for any creative art, you have to remain 110% conscious, and in a world that's losing consciousness, that's getting harder.

When you're on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn't exactly a sound - it's a hum, like the streets.

You know, when people look at a tree, they look at the leaves; they don't look at the spaces between the leaves. They're focused on the tree. I think there's an awareness of spaces or it wouldn't look like a tree to them.

Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it's not etched in your system.

When you're on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn't exactly a sound - it's a hum, like the streets.

When you use music to worship you are not attempting to entertain.

Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.

When I did the record, I was coming off a time when my contract had been sold and the music industry had changed a lot. I didn't understand how to make records for big labels. I was waiting for a new kind of record label to emerge.

You've got to realize. In the western world, regardless of what color you are, what title the music is, it's all played by the same notes.

Don't make music for some vast, unseen audience or market or ratings share or even for something as tangible as money. Though it's crucial to make a living, that shouldn't be your inspiration. Do it for yourself.

Whether I'm doing music or I'm walking down the street or I'm in a record store buying a record or I walk into a comic store and I'm buying comics or having a drink with my friends, it's the same me.

When rock came along the lyrics and melodies became less important and it bothered me to think that perhaps they might not regain the value they have to music - they are music.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

There is no music that can't be used politically, but the motives behind the creation of that music can be non-political.

The kind of music or the kind of arrangements that I do, the kind of musicians I choose, is just what I like to hear.

If not for music, I would probably be a very frustrated scientist. It's one way to answer the question, 'What is the meaning of life?' I feel music answers it better.

Since I'm allergic to various things, the army wouldn't accept me during the war, and I got into the Office of War Information, which sent music to Europe.

My singing is my hobby. It's me and my brother. We just enjoy writing music.

I was determined to carve out a music of my own. I didn't want to copy anybody.

I have tried to make the music a bit easier for them to understand.

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

That music and the lyrical aspects of Razorblade Romance is so personal to me that, now with me being grown up a bit and meeting new people and doing new things, it makes me look at the same things I was writing about back in the day through a different colored lens.

The only time I would like to see was the 20s and 30s in America because I love the music and the style and the optimism, I wanted to see New York being built. I wanted to see all that, you know.

My big love was the Beatles. I was more into music.

When we started making electronic music I imagined that the reaction we got from the rock musicians must have been similar to the one the beat groups got from people like my dad.

Uhm, I'm the one wanting the lessons! I don't want to say too much about it because I'd rather have you see the movie, but he's trying to find his music.

The value of music is to be able to play one note at the right time in the right way.

Younger players in this music often turn out to be middle aged; it is not a young music.