Quotes from the blog, here & there, over the years

For the professional, the industry is a large part of how you get to where you’re going.  For the aspirant artist, the industry is a large part of what stops you getting there.
— Robt Fripp, Thursday, 1.ix.2005

The musicologists are so happy, in a self-indulgent way, when they can point out the influences.  But that’s not what’s important.  What’s important is that the composer transforms those influences, and makes them his own.  Which reminds me of a wonderful Stravinsky statement.  He once said, “You must always steal, but never from yourself.” What he meant by that is quite obvious.  When you steal from yourself you learn nothing.  When you steal from others, you enrich your vocabulary.

— Lukas Foss

Music was invented to deceive and delude mankind.

— Ephorus, 4^th century B.C.

But whether I am really so unacceptable to the public as the expert judges always assert, and whether it is really so scared of my music—that often seems to me highly doubtful.

— Arnold Schoenberg

We aren’t worried about posterity; we want it to sound good now.

— Duke Ellington

Ireland banned Life of Brian, Meaning of Life, and another film I had made, about a prostitute, called Personal Services.  They had only ever banned four films in Ireland—and I’d made three of them.  I was rather proud of that.  I thought, “Well . . . you can’t do much better than that.”

— Terry Jones

I don’t know how old I am because the goat ate the Bible that had my birth certificate in it.  The goat lived to be twenty-seven.

— Satchel Paige (1906?-1982)

That he did not expect to meet such a blithely lethal female at a kiddie pool in the middle of a park in Dayton goes without saying.

— Leo Schulte (“Of Gnawing Time”)

What I want is an art of balance, of purity, an art that won’t disturb or trouble people.  I want anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose in my painting.

— Henri Matisse

I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn’t like it.

— Samuel Goldwyn

It is a good rule in life never to apologize.  The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

— P.G. Wodehouse