Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I loved Roger Miller.
Art cannot be above the battle.
It's just a matter of time before we're late.
'Walk on the Wild Side' was a very catchy song.
Through the '80s, nobody cared about Johnny Cash.
It's a hard thing to be an artist and not give up.
The more disastrous the mishaps the simpler the reviewing task.
Elvis may have been my first hero, but you couldn't relate to him.
Kendrick Lamar is a great, great thinker. He's a tremendous artist.
Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors.
Last night at Carnegie Hall, Jack Benny played Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn lost.
We need to define gentrification as separate from the process of displacement.
You had to read what I wrote if you lived in L.A. in 1975 and cared about pop music.
Johnny Cash was a good man. He tried to live up to his faith. It was just difficult.
Anybody who gets away with something will come back to get away with a little bit more.
It will never be mistaken for a high school gymnasium or a meeting room in a Midwestern motel.
I think there's a lot of writers who took rock music more seriously: Greil Marcus, Jon Landau.
The saddest fact I've learned is nobody matters less to our society than young black women. Nobody.
The Cure is clearly above average but seemingly unable to rally itself to move to a higher plateau.
Country music is full of affairs and cheating; that's where all those Hank Williams songs come from.
The Fire Department has traditionally considered architecture a priority only when it’s burning down.
The human brain can soften as a result of incessant listening to music with an intent to commit prose.
Take any celebrity - all we really know is what they choose to tell us, or what they show us in public.
Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.
By and large, musicians respect New York audiences, and also are greatly concerned about New York reviews.
When I began to interview people from the '60s, my first question was always, 'What was your favorite record?'
It is the destiny of the theater nearly everywhere and in every period to struggle even when it is flourishing.
Nostalgia is the bane of rock 'n' roll. He had the courage to let it all hang out. ... He was a considerable talent.
When Callas carried a grudge, she planted it, nursed it, fostered it, watered it and watched it grow to sequoia size.
Me growing up in the '60s and '70s, there was almost something romantic about drugs, Keith Richards taking drugs and stuff.
Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear.
On the subject of wild mushrooms, it is easy to tell who is an expert and who is not: The expert is the one who is still alive.
Without people like Dylan and the Beatles and people like Paul Simon, I think rock n' roll would have died out like Dixieland jazz.
I thought I pretty much knew Johnny Cash's life. But one of my personal discoveries was how little we know about any of these people.
When I was in high school in the '50s, all pop music - Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard - was aimed at teenagers. I loved that stuff.
Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.
An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.
Some writers sit down every day for two or three hours, at least, to write, whether they are in the mood or not. Others wait for inspiration.
But the truth is that L.A. was never entirely real anyway, as Steely Dan, Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, Larry David and Alan Ball all understood.
Like David Bowie, Madonna visualizes music so that her best work seems equally designed with the stage or screen in mind - not just the jukebox.
The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.
Just build a classic horseshoe of wood and plaster, and fill it with statuary and curtains, then sit back and savor the beautifully blended results.
When I met Johnny Cash, I didn't know what to ask: where were you born, who was your favorite recording artist, what's your favorite color - I didn't know.
I didn't have any idea that Gwen Stefani would evolve into this symbol of womanhood in America, but to me, that's not a musical story: it's a fashion story.
Thanks to the arrival of such spirited and purposeful groups as X, the Blasters, R.E.M., and the Replacements, American rock has made a spectacular comeback.
Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.
I'm guilty of being perceived as having narrow taste. I went after the artists that I thought were important - Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen and stuff.
I don't understand why people take Beyonce so seriously. You don't feel like there's a living, breathing person. It's not flesh and blood. It's just flesh and flesh.
There was a lot of sorrow in [Johnny] Cash's life. Even while he's trying to make music to inspire people he's fighting day after day with his own demons and sorrows.
Some people will never take Madonna seriously - just as many never took Marilyn Monroe seriously. Novelty images - especially that of a sex symbol - are hard to erase.