Leo Ornstein Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
Where you record is very important. It can't be too nice, it can't be too expensive, it can't have a view to an ocean or a field.
-
If you ask me, rockabilly has had a raw deal for far too long. People never shunned the blues or jazz the way they do rockabilly. But it's the original punk-rock, and it changed the way people looked at music for ever.
-
Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
-
When you start putting too much thought into it, the music starts getting too revealing. You don't need to know all my inner thoughts.
-
The people in your life are important. Meaningful relationships with those people are very important.
-
If you are a kid, reading is really important stuff.
-
I wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.
-
My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.
-
It's the comedy that guides me. The acting and all that stuff comes second. It's equally important, but I just try to do that as best as I can.
-
Music to me is so internal. It's physical and it's emotional. Whereas fashion is so much about the external that it's almost like a break. It's not inner turmoil. It's total escapism.
-
A good story gives you more of a license to be forward and progressive with the music.
-
An important notion in Indian political thought that is of great value to Hungary is the idea of peaceful development.
-
I've been loving music all my life.
-
I like pop music, and I like really weird, strange stuff. It just didn't feel like there was anyone doing both.
-
I've had writing sessions with people, but I've never had one where you're just there, and you start making a song, and then it's too good to be true that something really cool will come out of this.
-
All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.
-
Being an individual takes effort. Most people are pretty lazy. And that's OK! I mean, there are more important things than fashion. If it's going to stress you out to have a sense of style, don't do it. The important thing is to be comfortable so you can get on with your life.
-
I'm not very good at picking stuff up off the radio. It takes me way too long to learn other people's music.
-
I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.
-
It's usually so fraught when you're taking a picture. I work with an 8-by-10 view camera and there's a, you know, hood that I put over my head, and it's tricky and complicated.
-
Nature never uses prime numbers. But mathematicians do.
-
My family doesn't understand trying to chase your dreams because they were all about survival.
-
The measure of a conversation is how much mutual recognition there is in it; how much shared there is in it. If you're talking about what's in your own head, or without thought to what people looking and listening will feel, you might as well be in a room talking to yourself.
-
In writing music, the structure of each piece is a very important factor.
