Elvis Costello Quotes
-
I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.
-
I mistrust these people in music industry who can be everybody. This is where technology dictates to them. I mistrust that, that in somehow the chips capture the soul of a player, that's patent nonsense.
-
I woke up and one of us was crying.
-
Why can't a man stand alone? Must he be burdened by all that he's taught to consider his own? His skin and his station, his kin and his crown, his flag and his nation They just weigh him down.
-
Then I became an altar boy because of the solemn face, but I got thrown out at fourteen for laughing, because the priest used to mumble everything except the church plate takings.
-
You'll never be alone in the bone orchard.
-
I'm goin' to take a little trip, down paradise's endless shores. They say that travel broadens the mind, till you can't get your head out of doors.
-
Why'd you have to say that there's always someone who can do it better than I can And don't you think that I know that walkin' on water won't make me a miracle man.
-
And I'm up while the dawn is breaking, even though my heart is aching. I should be drinking a toast to absent friends instead of these comedians.
-
There are some things you can't cover up with lipstick and powder.
-
It's not crazy to want to have certain songs be developed harmonically and still want to make noise with the guitar. And you can have both.
-
You can be addicted to misery the same way as you can be addicted to drugs.
-
I'm drawing from two generations back how to think about music, how to think about why you travel to make music, what the possible pitfalls of that are for the way your life is structured. The good and bad of all of it get into the mix of what's created, what you're creating.
-
You swore you wouldn't shout. If it's not your punch, then it's your pout.
-
I'd be very suspicious of anybody that seems to have to move to the next level of expression. I distrust that: now I'm writing a book, now I'm being an actor. It should be a natural thing. I think it's a natural thing for you to act. But I think that people that feel that, because they've written one maybe quite beautiful love song that equips them to play Romeo, is probably misguided.
-
Elvis Presley and Puccini shall return.
-
The truth can't hurt you, it's just like the dark. It scares you witless, but in time you see things clear and stark.
-
I just got into it like a lot of people through the rock 'n' roll bands in the late '60s that turned to country music, like The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, but particularly through The Byrds because of Gram Parsons, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman (with their 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo). They kind of introduced English kids to Merle Haggard and George Jones and the Louvins (brothers Charlie and Ira).
-
Some people can't physically hear things. A kid that listens to Metallica or something can't hear that, because he's filled himself up with this stuff, he physically can't hear a banjo or a harp or something.
-
Commercial radio is absolutely the enemy of music. They are my sworn and mortal enemy, and I will have nothing to do with them.
-
The radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools tryin' to anesthetize the way that you feel.
-
Sometimes I write notes that I have difficulty singing. And you start talking yourself out of the bold melody and start wanting to arrange it in another key or something. Maybe I just never learned my harmony part, because what everybody says sounds odd to them sounds perfectly natural to me.
-
You've got a chemistry class; I want a piece of your mind; You don't know what you started when you mixed it up with mine.
-
Though the passion still flutters and flickers, it never got into our knickers.