Roxy Music Quotes
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I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'
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Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer.
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Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.
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I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.
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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.
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Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.
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It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.
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The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.
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When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.
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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.
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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.
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One often makes music to supplement one's world.
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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.
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Ideas worth questioning: 'Being an artist is a job for life.'
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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.
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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.'
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Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.
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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.
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With devices my technique is always to hide the handbook in the drawer until I've played with it for a while. The handbook always tells you what it does, and you can be quite sure that if it's a complex device it can do at least fifteen other things that weren't predicted in the handbook, or that they didn't consider desirable. It's normally those other things that interest me.
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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.
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I often work by avoidance.
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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.
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I very rarely play the piano at home. Deliberately, so that when I do play it, I love it.
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The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.
