Artists & Musicians

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.
Musician Louis Armstrong

He looks like a dwarf who’s been dipped in a bucket of pubic hair.
Boy George on Prince

Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.
Eddie Cantor (1892 - 1964)

When [my mother] was dying, talking to me, she said: “Always try and be kind and nice to people. And if you do that, somebody will always speak up for you." And I’ve found that to be a fact. They really do.
Musician B. B. King

Disclaimer: If anyone disagrees with anything I say, I am quite prepared to not only retract it, but also to deny under oath I ever said it.
Tom Lehrer (American singer-songwriter, satirist, pianist, and mathematician)

I always say – that everything is possessed of infinity and eternity….
Musician Yehudi Menuhin

Most people love you for who you pretend to be ... To keep their love, you keep pretending--performing. You get to love your pretense ... It's true, we're locked in an image, an act. And, the sad thing is, people get so used to their image--they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And, if you try to remind them, they hate you for it. They feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession.
James Morrison, lead singer of The Doors

In this age, I don’t think people are as happy; they are worried. They’re too anxious to get ahead of their neighbors; they are striving and striving to get something better. I do think in a way that they have too much now. We did with much less.
Artist Grandma Moses

Blessed is he who has learned to laugh at himself, for he shall never cease to be entertained.
John Powell (British film music composer)

To bring joy, hope, to make life richer for the spirit because you have been alive, that is the most important thing.
Musician Arthur Rubinstein

The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.
Alan Saporta (musician)

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try.
Beverly Sills (American operatic soprano)

If I had as many love affairs as you have given me credit for, I would now be speaking to you from a jar in the Harvard Medical School.
Frank Sinatra

I once asked my history teacher how we were expected to learn anything useful from his subject, when it seemed to me to be nothing but a monotonous and sordid succession of robber baron scumbags devoid of any admirable human qualities. I failed history.
Sting

Never look at the trombones. You'll only encourage them.
Richard Strauss, on conducting

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever comes to sit by it. Passersby see only a wisp of smoke rising from the chimney and continue on their way.
Vincent Van Gogh

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.
Andrew Wyeth (American realist painter)