"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side." ~ Hunter S. Thompson ~

"Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there." ~ Miles Davis ~

"Music hath charm to soothe the savage beast, but I’d try a revolver first." ~ Josh Billings ~

"After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music." ~ Aldous Huxley ~

"I don’t know anything about music.  In my line, you don’t have to." ~ Elvis Presley ~

"Let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music."
~ Kurt Vonnegut ~

"When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have." ~ Edgar Watson Howe ~

"I’m really schizophrenic about that, because on the one hand I would say, yes there is, there’s something inherently, even violent about it, it’s wild and raw and all this. On the other hand, the fact is that ‘Sugar Sugar’ is great Rock ‘n’ Roll, and there’s nothing rebellious about that at all. I mean that’s right from the belly and heart of capitalism…."
~ Lester Bangs (in 1980 on the rebellious nature of rock ‘n’ roll) ~

"I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time." ~ Bonnie Raitt ~

"Music is such a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously." ~ Henry Miller ~

"usic is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.."
~ Charlie Parker ~

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." ~ Henry David Thoreau ~

"All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff." ~ Frank Zappa ~

"I’ve never met a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down." ~ Virgil Thomson ~

"Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try." ~ Mary Kay Ash ~

"Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love." ~ Louis-Hector Berlioz ~

"Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation." ~ Lester Bangs (from A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise, published in the Village Voice in 1981) ~

"Where words fail, music speaks." ~ Hans Christian Andersen ~

"Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes." ~ Bill Cosby ~

"I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it." ~ James Taylor ~

"Rock ‘n’ roll: Music for the neck downwards." ~ Keith Richards ~

"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another." ~ Frank Zappa ~

"Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it." ~ Henry David Thoreau ~

"Music is spiritual. The music business is not." ~ Van Morrison ~

"You are the music while the music lasts." ~ T.S. Eliot ~