My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.
I love a lot of things, and I'm pretty much obsessive about most things I do, whether it be gardening, or architecture, or music. I'd be an obsessive hairdresser.
I have realised how exciting and easy it is to be a time traveller by looking at paintings and films and architecture and playing music or listening to it. I don't think you necessarily have to live in the present all the time.
I think in America there's this free flow between fashion, art, architecture, music and design. In Europe, it's more segregated between those different disciplines, I think.
If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.
I was attracted to a lot of different art forms - dancing, painting. But there's something about music that people hold so close. It's such a powerful art form, and that's why I live for it.
There's always the influence of music, film, art and the other things that drive me. I'm usually inspired by my environment and whatever is making me happy or mad.
But then when he left, I realized that it was harder to write songs and feel spiritually connected to art and music as a band. When he came back I felt it again, instantaneously.
Music draws from almost the identical place as art does, which really is that intangible - it's like you're pulling from the ether. I don't know where it comes from.
It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created.
Music is an art that expresses the inexpressible. It rises far above what words can mean or the intelligence define. Its domain is the imponderable and impalpable land of the unconscious.
I was never much of a musical theater guy, but I have so much more respect for the art form, the physical exertion of doing eight shows on Broadway a week, I cannot even fathom it.
Ragtime has about the same amount of respect as comics. And in a way they're similar art forms. Ragtime is highly compositional, and the emotion in the music is built in, whereas in jazz a lot of that emotion comes from the way it's performed.
That was the impetus for me to do music or art, because I knew if I didn't try when I was young, then I would get to be in my 40's and I'd be really unhappy that I hadn't.
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.
I will never forget experiencing Venice for the first time. It feels like you are transported to another time - the art, music, food and pure romance in the air is like no other place.
My parents worked in the art world. They were really supportive of my music in that they allowed me to drop out of school and move out of our home, which not many parents would do.
As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.
Listen to your inner-voice: Surround yourself with loving, nurturing people. Fall in love with your art and find yourself. Music is the great communicator.
There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music.
In Australia, there aren't a lot of people committed to art, so these communities form that are dedicated to music, theater, cinema, but they're very small. So, they tend to move ahead on the power of collaboration, enthusiasm and creativity.
