Quotes About Expression

What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

A chimpanzee could learn what I do physically, but it goes way beyond that. When you play, you play life.

I love music more than I love people.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

It is a real pleasure to see music so bright and spontaneous expressed with corresponding ease and grace.

When people say you're doing something radical in rock or dance music, I'm not sure how special that is. What we do is so old-fashioned. It's like trying to do something innovative in tap-dancing.

I never took sheet music seriously. I could do better myself just by listening to other people and using my own intuition.

You cannot play the piano well unless you are singing within you.

If something happened where I couldnt write music anymore, it would kill me. Its not just a job. Its not just a hobby. Its why I get up in the morning.

Stone walls confine a tinker; cold iron binds a witch; but a musician's music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind.

It's always about the music, never about anything else.

Music comes from the musician, not the instrument.

I am sure my music has a taste of codfish in it.

I like being in a recording studio. I like watching a song go from the simplicity of the original music.

Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread--without it, it's flat.

When I was a kid growing up in the '60s, music was an outlet for enlightenment, frustration, rebellion. It was more about individualism. Today it's just like a big business.

If you play music for no other reason than actually just because you love it, the skills just kinda creep up on you.

Music is the only thing that will give and give and give and not take.

Music is not a hobby, not even a passion with me; music is me. I feel what people get out of me is this outlook on life, which comes out in my music. My music is the last expression of all that.

Making dances is an act of progress; it is an act of growth, an act of music, an act of teaching, an act of celebration, an act of joy.

When you play, never mind who listens to you.

I've always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their routines if they burst into song at significant moments.

The blues will always be because the blues are the roots of all American music.