Ethel Smyth Quotes
The writer must resist this temptation to quote and do his best with his own tools. It would be most convenient for us musicians if, arrived at a given emotional crisis in our work, we could simply stick in a few bars of Brahms or Schubert. Indeed many composers have no hesitation in so doing. But I have never heard the practice defended; possibly because that hideous symbol of petty larceny, the inverted comma, cannot well be worked into a musical score.
Quotes to Explore
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What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
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I am not an autobiographical writer.
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I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.
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There's something about live players that you cannot get with machines: With live musicians, you can strike a groove, you can feed off each other... And, even though somebody might make a slight mistake, it's all real!
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I've basically worked as a journalist and a writer.
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Well I could have been just a writer. I had been a hair dresser. I could have stuck with that.
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'The Unity Band' project has been life-changing for me. I have led many groups of talented musicians, but this is unlike anything else.
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A writer has to live with a sense of honor.
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I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians.
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I was just as voracious a writer as I was a reader.
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I love music and I love musicians and when I hear something that's great, I always say it's like you go to a movie and you can't wait to tell your friends about it.
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I think Paris smells not just sweet but melancholy and curious, sometimes sad but always enticing and seductive. She's a city for the all senses, for artists and writers and musicians and dreamers, for fantasies, for long walks and wine and lovers and, yes, for mysteries.
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I'm not a great writer.
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I've always thought that actors wanted to be pop musicians and pop musicians wanted to be actors.
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Hamp would ask me about tempos in the band: 'Jacquet,' he'd say, 'knock off that tempo.' A lot of jazz musicians didn't prefer to play for dancers, which was their loss, really. But good jazz has always had that dance feel.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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I don't look at myself as a writer; I am a storyteller.
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Artists and musicians of the Sixties were definitely into clothes.
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I always knew I wanted to be a writer.
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A taste for the best reading is not cultivated in Spanish girls, even where the treasures of that great Castilian literature are accessible to them.
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I have this sensation of being in flight all the time, but being on stage is like creating a sanctuary in which you can completely lose yourself. The bits of your personality that you keep under wraps in ordinary life, you can let them run free.
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The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
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The writer must resist this temptation to quote and do his best with his own tools. It would be most convenient for us musicians if, arrived at a given emotional crisis in our work, we could simply stick in a few bars of Brahms or Schubert. Indeed many composers have no hesitation in so doing. But I have never heard the practice defended; possibly because that hideous symbol of petty larceny, the inverted comma, cannot well be worked into a musical score.
