Roxy Music Quotes
-
Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies.
-
People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye. Of course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard and expensive to hit. I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
-
I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.
-
Democracy is a daring concept - a hope that we'll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place where the intelligence and local knowledge of the electorate sums together to arrive at actions that reflect the participation of the largest possible number of people.
-
It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.
-
I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.'
-
I hate the thought that someone had picked up one of my song records and was really excited about it, and walks [out of] a record shop with On Land and is disappointed because it isn't what they wanted. So, I try to make signs, graphically and visually, to say to people "Okay, this is this department of my work and this is this other department of my work." And of course I'm very pleased if people like all of them, but I don't want them to feel deceived at any point.
-
I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.
-
I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.
-
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.
-
I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.
-
Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.
-
I often work by avoidance.
-
One often makes music to supplement one's world.
-
People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.
-
At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.
-
Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.
-
When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.
-
Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.
-
Performing was terrifying.
-
Ideas worth questioning: 'Being an artist is a job for life.'
-
I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it.
-
If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche.
-
I very rarely play the piano at home. Deliberately, so that when I do play it, I love it.