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.'
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.
The first complete sentence out of my mouth was probably that line about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds.
I sometimes wonder what would've happened if I'd entered the competition instead - I'd probably have come nowhere and given up on the whole fiction game.
No two notes are ever the same volume. With the guitar, you really have to model in your mind this wider thing; you're trying to create the illusion of a bigger dynamic range.
There are some musicians who are talented and see themselves as some kind of natural geniuses or something because of a certain amount of natural ability. But that is often rarely the case over the long term.
The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel. Piet Mondrian The Artist's Way A Spiritual Path to Greater Creativity by Julia Cameron
I'm about to start working with a singer I met on my last trip: she'll get international exposure, and I'll have a song out in that market sung in Cantonese.
Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.
Sometimes I get very dressed up just to go to the corner for some bread; I dress for my own amusement.
I’m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.
Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence.
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.
Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow.
The anarchist painter is not the one who will create anarchist pictures, but the one who will fight with all his individuality against official conventions.
I obviously had my reggae, but I got quite into rockabilly when I was a kid, because I was trying to find something that represented me as a white person.
You will find that reason, which always ought to direct mankind, seldom does; but that passions and weaknesses commonly usurp its seat, and rule in its stead.
I mean the flesh, never fade! The flesh never leave the creation, see, because with that divine spirit the flesh cannot fade. If the spirit is weak then the flesh fade, seen?
Most of my songs are about Jesus. Most of my songs are about the idea that there is salvation, and that there is a Savior. But I won't mention his name in a song just to get a cheap play.
Although I dig my guitar playing, I think it's kind of an obvious situation; I play what I want to play within my own restrictions.
English banjo players really were a law unto themselves - you don't find that kind of brisk banjo playing on the original Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke records.
