Music

Here are a few fun quotes about music...

"I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse."

Bing Crosby

"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

"Chaos is a friend of mine."

Bob Dylan

"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

"What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?"

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"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 ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten 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 the poems."

Ringo Starr

"Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently."

James Gibbons Hunekar

"If a young man at the age of twenty-three 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

"God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way."

Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player

"In opera, there is always too much singing."

Claude Debussy

"If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it."

Pierre Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville

"Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings."

Robert Benchley

"Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!"

Gioacchino Rossini