My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer.
Cole Porter
Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already.
Gustav Mahler, to Bruno Walter, who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria.
I would rather play "Chiquita Banana" and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve.
Xavier Cugat
Musicians talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art.
Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home.
The amount of money one needs is terrifying...
Ludwig van Beethoven
Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living.
Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer
I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet.
Niccolo Paganini
Of course I'm ambitious. What's wrong with that? Otherwise you sleep all day. Ringo Starr
Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats.
Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Mich.
If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation. - Oscar Wilde
Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.
Mel Brooks
Life can't be all bad when for 10 dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for 10 years.
William F. Buckley Jr.
You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow.
Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
Mark Twain
I love Beethoven, especially his poems.
Ringo Starr
If a young man at the age of 23 can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder.
Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland
There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major.
Sergei Prokofiev
I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?
Dimitri Mitropoulos
God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.
Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player
Already too loud!
Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, on seeing
the players reaching for their instruments
I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere.
Frederic Chopin
When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano.
Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller
Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.
Richard Strauss
In opera, there is always too much singing.
Claude Debussy
Oh how wonderful, really wonderful, opera would be if there were no singers!
Gioacchino Rossini
Movie music is noise. It's even more painful than my sciatica.
Sir Thomas Beecham
I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the 20th century that has made giant strides in reverse.
Bing Crosby
Theirs (the Beatles') is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism. In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the indulged amateurisness of the musical material, though closely rivaled by the indifference of the performing style, is actually surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method. "Strawberry Fields" suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.
Glenn Gould
It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.
Jerry Garcia
Hell is full of musical amateurs. Music is the brandy of the damned.
George Bernard Shaw
(on refusing to play encores) Applause is a receipt, not a bill.
Artur Shnabel
Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been put up to a critic
Jean Sibelius
The business of music should in some measure lead to the love of the beautifull.
Plato
All my life I was having trouble with women... I've done a lot of writing about women. Then, after I quit having trouble with them, I could feel in my heart that somebody would always have trouble with them, so I kept writing those blues.
Muddy Watters
If music be the breakfast food of love, kindly do not disturb until lunchtime
James Agee
Loud music is too harsh for ladies heads, since they love men in arms as well as beds.
Sheakespeare
Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.
Henry Miller
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
Igor Stravinsky
Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
Oscar Wilde
There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.
Ron Wood
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
The Mandolin is the bottom four strings of the guitar, backwards...so a person with dyslexia has no problem learning to play the Mandolin.
Steve Goodman
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.
Victor Hugo
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Good musicians execute their music but bad ones murder it.
Some musicians take pains with music, others give them.
In music, the passions enjoy themselves. --Nietzsche
Hug a musician, they never get to dance.