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I started with rock n' roll and...then you start to take it apart like a child with a toy and you see there's blues and there's country...Then you go back from country into American music...and you end up in Scotland and Ireland eventually.
Elvis Costello -
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.
Elvis Costello
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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 Costello -
Your mind is made up but your mouth is undone.
Elvis Costello -
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.
Elvis Costello -
You'll never be alone in the bone orchard.
Elvis Costello -
I can write orchestrations, but I can't sight-read music and play at the same time. I don't have enough facility.
Elvis Costello -
Though the passion still flutters and flickers, it never got into our knickers.
Elvis Costello
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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.
Elvis Costello -
I'm not going to get too sentimental, like those other sticker valentines, 'cause I don't know if you are loving some body. I only know it isn't mine.
Elvis Costello -
My grandfather and my father disagreed about music, not least of all because my dad wanted to improvise. It wasn't just that he wanted to play different music; it was just that he came off the dots.
Elvis Costello -
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.
Elvis Costello -
You swore you wouldn't shout. If it's not your punch, then it's your pout.
Elvis Costello -
Somebody should clip Sting around the head and tell him to stop using that ridiculous Jamaican accent.
Elvis Costello
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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.
Elvis Costello -
In the tiny torn up pieces of his mind he's irresistible too.
Elvis Costello -
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.
Elvis Costello -
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.
Elvis Costello -
I really thought twice about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when that came in. I always was of a mind that it's an inherently stupid idea to put something like that in a glass case.
Elvis Costello -
The cost of living in sin would make a poor man out of Paul Getty.
Elvis Costello
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It's what's on the record not what labels on it. You know, that's like getting a box of cornflakes and eating the cardboard.
Elvis Costello -
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.
Elvis Costello -
Morrissey writes wonderful song titles, but sadly he often forgets to write the song.
Elvis Costello -
Commercial radio is owned by one or two corporations now, and they're not in the music business. They're in the advertising business.... So let's not kid ourselves. If you want to hear music, go buy a guitar.
Elvis Costello