Cecil Taylor (Cecil Percival Taylor) Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I always loved music, and I always wanted to make a film about it, but I could never do it because of the censorship that was around.
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Most of my songs have names of people I've met or are dear to me. There are people who have privacy issues and about people knowing about their private life. But for me, I like to include few special names and few details about them to make the song very special to me.
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My first year of college was tough. I thought that just being an athlete I could get by. I thought I was okay until I got kicked out, which happened twice.
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Investors are right to demand a clear path to self-sustainability from every business they invest in, and I believe we should ask for the same from philanthropy.
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Life is God's art.
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I'm not bothered or sad about being on my own - after all, I've never had a husband.
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As much as it might look like, to someone else, that I'm successful, I never feel like I'm anywhere. The further I go, I still feel equally further from my eventual goal. Because as I grow, I get more goals. I'm never content.
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I don't think any of us can compete with Cowell. He is the best at what he does.
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Man does not live by words alone, in spite of the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
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America is a collection of people from different races, religions, and backgrounds - that is part of what makes us great. But a common language is what brings all of those people together to form a community.
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Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.
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If we have anything kind to say, any tender sentiment to express, we feel a sense of shame.
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I think it's almost a law of nature that there are only certain things that hit an emotive space, and that's what was always special for me about music: it made me feel something.
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Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.
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I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
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When I was growing up, I always knew that if I ever got anything, I was going to give back as much as I can. I learned that all you have to be willing to do is give your time.
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The prayer offered to God in the morning during your quiet time is the key that unlocks the door of the day. Any athlete knows that it is the start that ensures a good finish.
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I never know what I'm going to wear until five minutes before I go somewhere... I guess I know what I'm comfortable in. I don't know how to describe that, I mean you either put it on and go 'no way' or 'OK, let's go.'
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A guitar riff played on a piano doesn't come close to the purity of it being played on a guitar but I faked it enough to get by.
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He had thrown himself away, he had lost interest in everything, and life, falling in with his feelings, had demanded nothing of him. He had lived as an outsider, an idler and onlooker, well liked in his young manhood, alone in his illness and advancing years. Seized with weariness, he sat down on the wall, and the river murmured darkly in his thoughts.
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In a pine tree behind me, an eagle waits out the rain, hunched into himself, brooding. Crows squabble, a murder chasing a raven. Seals cruise the lines of fishing nets bobbing in the water, hoping for an easy meal, the tender bellies of salmon.
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I prefer rock music—my favorites are R.E.M. and Matthew Sweet—but I think that if Dr. Buckley played Matthew Sweet, some of her patients would not like it. Matthew Sweet has a song called “Sick of Myself,” and I am pretty sure that is exactly the wrong song name for a therapist’s waiting room.
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To me, the piano in itself is an orchestra.
