Cecil Taylor (Cecil Percival Taylor) Quotes
You must surrender whatever preconceptions you have about music if you're really interested in it.
Quotes to Explore
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Don't let nobody tell you that you can't do it. Love what you do until you don't love it anymore. Nothing's impossible.
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A little and a little, collected together, becomes a great deal; the heap in the barn consists of single grains, and drop and drop make the inundation.
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It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.
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I tend to write short, brief snippets - I lean toward the chamber music end as opposed to the symphony end of things.
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I'm obsessed with Radiohead. They're just the greatest band on the planet.
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My mum is a bit unconventional; she's outdoorsy and has more of an emotional intelligence, whereas my dad is pragmatic; he's a businessman.
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Don't monitor your online savings account in real time.
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I like music that's more offensive. I like it to sound like nails on a blackboard, get me wild.
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Anyone can be confident with a full head of hair. But a confident bald man - there's your diamond in the rough.
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Then this will only prove again and again, that Monarchy in Germany is he longer capable of a national act.
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My connection with Basquiat was really in Los Angeles, which really was a whole different world to what he was experiencing in New York.
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What is important for kids to learn is that no matter how much money they have, earn, win, or inherit, they need to know how to spend it, how to save it, and how to give it to others in need. This is what handling money is about, and this is why we give kids an allowance.
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I'm old enough to remember when the polio vaccine was still new. Also, it hadn't been that long since most people who caught pneumonia died from it. These medical breakthroughs were practically miracles.
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'Floating Worlds,' which received a fair amount of attention when it was first published, deserves rediscovery.
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I'm anti-cheese in a salad.
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You don't just have a story - you're a story in the making, and you never know what the next chapter's going to be. That's what makes it exciting.
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I'd love to do a sci-fi movie, a western, or an espionage thriller. But I'm not going to limit myself. If a good script comes along, I'm not going to discount it because it doesn't fit into one of these genres.
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The majority of my audience has always been women.
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As a musician usually music is your way out.
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I come from an art-school background, and I still feel that in my music, it's about exploration and challenging myself, about putting myself in a place that's frightening because I haven't been there before.
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With the violin, for example, one understands culturally that the sound comes from the instrument that can be seen. With electronic music, it is not the same at all. That's why it seemed so important to me, from the beginning of my career, to invent a grammar, a visual vocabulary adapted to electronic music.
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You must surrender whatever preconceptions you have about music if you're really interested in it.
