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It costs so much to promote something these days that almost always safety is the preferred option, reference back to things which have been successful in the past. Also, people are simply not given the time to develop and find themselves and their audience as we were.

Peter Hammill
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Being used to scientific terminology and theory it was always natural for me to push this stuff into songs.
Peter Hammill
I continue to believe, contrary to the given wisdom, that it's more interesting to have an album - or, indeed, an individual song - which has variety rather than homogeneity.
Peter Hammill
It costs so much to promote something these days that almost always safety is the preferred option, reference back to things which have been successful in the past. Also, people are simply not given the time to develop and find themselves and their audience as we were.
Peter Hammill
Actually I think Art lies in both directions - the broad strokes, big picture but on the other hand the minute examination of the apparently mundane. Seeing the whole world in a grain of sand, that kind of thing.
Peter Hammill
Seriously, these days I tend to shut up in terms of external analysis and DO try to let things speak for themselves, while still trying to get some depth into them.
Peter Hammill
So I, for one, didn't feel alienated by what happened in 77.
Peter Hammill
Marc Almond has done a couple of covers, a few people in Europa have done them. I own all the publishing. It's never really been addressed, as I haven't had the time to go out and tout the songs.
Peter Hammill
I had then and still retain an interest in science for its own sake and as a metaphor for our current lives.
Peter Hammill
The crucial question one comes back to is the examination; without that experience is meaningless. And I think it's true that society is becoming more and more passive, less and less fired up with enthusiasm, in many spheres.
Peter Hammill
The passage of time is a continuing thing. At 18, you're going to live forever, and you are definitely not at 52, so that is a recurring topic. I still think it's the main stuff.
Peter Hammill
I do flip between being chatty and argumentative - and being a psycho-loner werewolf.
Peter Hammill
I had a vision of myself as a novelist because that was where I could be serious. I couldn't with music.
Peter Hammill
I suppose, in a way, one could say I may be less interested in my career than the audience is. Not to mean that I'm disinterested in my career, but I don't see it in terms of one stepping stone or, 'Now I'm going to go into my blue phase,' or what have you.
Peter Hammill
I'm not sure that Jesuits ever produce faithful Catholics. Because they're too fierce. It is Sturm und Drang, and it is guilt - it is all that battlefield stuff.
Peter Hammill
If you're going to have a heart attack, mine was the kind to have. I'm thankful that it hasn't affected my output or my capacity to perform. And it has given me a lot to think and write about.
Peter Hammill
More people seem to know the Van der Graaf Generator material than my solo work - thanks, I suppose, to their parents' lingering vinyl collections.
Peter Hammill
My dictum has always been: 'This show is happening just here, just tonight, with these people who are in this hall, and nobody knows what's going to happen until it's done.'
Peter Hammill
My mother was from West Bromwich; my grandfather was Pakistani. I had an aunt who started trying to trace the family tree and stopped when she saw what turned up.
Peter Hammill
There's always a Van der Graaf audience that wants to hear the band's sound. And totally fair enough. Why not? It's a band. You like the band, you like the band.
Peter Hammill
To be honest, I don't know really what I do on stage.
Peter Hammill
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
Henri Bergson
Although Alchemy has now fallen into contempt, and is even considered a thing of the past, the physicain should not be influenced by such judgements.
Paracelsus
I do like to drive fast and I have gotten pulled over in the past. I use my skills to get out of tickets.
Josie Maran
You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.
Bob Dylan
The best prophet of the future is the past.
George Byron
Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.
Dale Turner
Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
Edmond de Goncourt
You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.
Elizabeth Moon
America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
Frederick Douglass
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
Buddha
Terrorism, ladies and gentlemen, in my eyes I have a very, very, very simple explanation. Gangs of criminals, killers, used unfortunately by certain governments in the past for political purposes, who are on their own now as gangs.
Hamid Karzai
In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.
Dwight Yoakam
By this time it was past six, and the enemy's van and ours were at too great a distance to engage, I perceived some of their ships stretching to the northward; and I imagined they were going to form a new line.
John Byng
Firms would be given initial entitlements to gross markup on the basis of past performance. These entitlements would be transferable and a market in them would be developed.
William Vickrey
I mean that at least 80% of the Russian people feel destitute. It's the people who had their past and future taken from them - they don't get paid - many of them face a wall. They have nowhere to go.
Aleksandr Lebed
They spend their time looking forward to the past.
John Osborne
Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
A. J. P. Taylor
It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.
Doug Coupland
The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Yes, romance has found it's way into my heart in the past.
Michelle Trachtenberg
Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.
Slobodan Milosevic
The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.
Jonathan Lethem
In the past I've made movies that were pretty universally liked. You can't really hate them. You can discard them, but you can't really hate them.
Ang Lee
No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.
Christopher Dawson
And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.
Samuel Butler
Parents are like shuttles on a loom. They join the threads of the past with threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go.
Fred Rogers
I'm not here to discuss the past... I'm here to be positive.
Mark McGwire