Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I keep my house tidy, because then I can think clearly. I feel the same about myself. Presenting yourself well is a working-class thing - my dad was a printer, but he wore a tie most days. The ungroomed look belongs more to the middle classes.
I grew up playing football since the day I could walk; some of my greatest memories of childhood are playing touch football in all kinds of weather with my best friends. That's a part of the American experience that no corporation can destroy.
People like Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony and M. L. K. are larger than life to me. I find myself staring at photographs of Lincoln almost in disbelief that he was a man who walked the earth and not merely some fiction writer's creation.
And I know how many DJ pools have grown and I know how DJing has grown in the overall, but that was the technical side of it to me. DJs were rolling around, looking for stuff to buy and looking to see what was in the store when they get there.
Of course, right away I got more interested in the far-out jazz than the traditional jazz, so I quickly was turned onto the John Zorn scene and all the wild stuff coming out of New York and Europe. Improvising is a pretty natural thing for me.
I don't feel competition at all. I just feel like I want to be the best. In everything that Michael (Jackson) did, he was the best. When he was dancing, when he was singing, he always wanted to be the best, and that's me... He's the guideline.
I could be dramatic and go "He saved my life!", but sometimes you just need to see it again. Sometimes you need to see that person want it so badly for all the right reasons, and it makes you realize that no matter what you do you already won.
I don't know how many times I literally hear this. It's the worst pun in the world from some idiotic frat guy. It's like, 'You must be 'Jealous' of Nick!' Constantly! It's like, why? He's doing his thing. I'm doing mine! He's happy. I'm happy.
I was a weird teenager. My mother was actually worried because I didn't have any interest in dating in my teenage years. I had all this desire to pursue my passions like ballet, then sailing, then music, so I didn't have any emptiness to fill.
The clothes in themselves are empty. But what they throw off and what clothes mean as signifiers is incredibly interesting - to see what people do with it. That's more interesting to me than flipping through a magazine or seeing the fall look.
Some people just cannot take certain foods. That's all. People are allergic. Some people are allergic to orange juice, can you imagine? Orange juice is very healthy isn't it? Yet some people cannot drink it without having an allergic reaction.
I think the hardest part for musicians is what a wide gulf of time there is between when you decide to sober up and when you have the ability to navigate being social and having relationships and being in a band and having friends while sober.
I got signed with the songwriting deal when I was sixteen and they were really great - my publishers, who to this day are still my publishers and are like my musical family, my second family - they took me in and taught me what a good song is.
There's a big difference, I discovered, between wanting to die and not wanting to live. When you want to die, you at least have a goal. When you don't want to live, you're really just empty. That's the point I was at before I was able to make.
I don't think any of us felt like, "Oh, we need to put joke songs on the record." If we found something funny, we would record it, and if we wanted to, we'd put it on the record. It's not really something we spent too much time agonizing over.
INXS never had that groupie thing. No, no we really never did. Not in a sexual way - well, alright, then, maybe years ago. I've done a few stupid things in my time, but you've got to have respect for yourself, otherwise you end up getting used
Most of the musicians that I know almost to the man everybody uses Apple computers. They've thought of the steps that you're going to think of when you're trying to create your thing. And that's where the tools get invented to make better art.
It was really different this time, because we did everything in the studio and thought out the writing and song structures. Before this album ["The Black Crown"], we used to just write riff after riff and then worry about the rest of it later.
Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will - all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely.
I love America. I really do. It's by far the place I like visiting out of anywhere in the world. I get a palpable sense of excitement when the plane's landing. It's a cliché, but there's still an incredible energy about New York in particular.
What can I say that will make people that are in recovery want to stand up and support Recovery Month? A friend of mine said, 'You know, the fact that you did a really honest book and it changed people's lives, that's something to talk about.'
Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.
Elvis deserves a lot of credit for bringing the blues to middle America, not the Vegas stuff. The early stuff, The Sun records, and the first few RCA records. He was wonderful, he had the power, the drive, and he was so dedicated to his music.
You can only exist as far as your mind will allow you to exist, and I think chronic pain will stop time dead in its tracks. You feel like you're the only one, and how unfair it is, and a million different feel-sorry-for-yourself type feelings.
I didn't become a commercially successful artist by design, and actually I think that commercially successful just means, if you analyse it, that a lot of people like you. It's become a dirty word, and I don't necessarily think it needs to be.
I'm just living each day, and I'm better equipped to do so. I mean, I used to be totally afraid, I used to have, like, permanent stage fright. But now I'm trying to have fun. I'm trying to bring as much happiness to as many people as possible.
The trouble is now, with rock'n'roll and stuff, it gets so big that it loses what once upon a time was a magnificent thing, where it was special and quite elusive and occasionally a little sinister and it had its own world nobody could get in.
It's part of me to get off on those moments where... well, what people would call attention. Obviously, that isn't the be-all and end-all of life, but at the states of creativity that I've reached, well, it helps the lyrics along a little bit.
The sound levels on stage were so loud with all that constant banging and smash, smash, smash; it did untold damage to the fine nerve endings in the inner ear, though it is worse in the left, which is the side of my snare drum and the monitor.
It was brilliant in LA. The kids were young enough for it not to disturb their education and it was an incredibly healthy lifestyle. The weather's so good that you're up every morning, walking in the canyons, playing tennis three times a week.
I wrote 90 percent of the record in prison. A lot of people wonder, "How the hell did you do that?" I just pretty much played drums on my legs with my hands and while I did that, I would hum the guitar parts and sing the melodies of the songs.
You've been gone so long from all that you know. It's been shuffled aside as you bask in the glow. All the beauitful strangers who whisper your name, do they fill up the emptiness? Larger that life is your fiction, in a universe made upon one.
I'm trying to get good message out to the people. It's like the scriptures because you know what the scriptures are in the bible. Words of Jah, words of Christ, words of Rasta and everything that's righteous are in the scriptures unto I and I.
The one thing I do believe is, if you make the songs about the human aspects of things, you've got a much better chance of having the music transcend the times. If you make them very political and very topical, it's going to date very quickly.
Laws never protect anyone, despite claiming to be all about protecting the public. Each legal restriction only strengthens the power of mafia and crime organising who step in to help people do what the law says they can't do, in every country.
Someone will say, 'Well, that's good enough.' As soon as I hear 'Good enough,' it really bothers me. I spend as much time as I think I can on anything I do. I try to do that with the people that work with me. I try to get the best out of them.
I got really frustrated in jail, and I was like, 'Man, I love what I've done, and I love the mark I've made on rock n' roll history'... and I sat there, and I got really depressed, thinking, 'I gotta make a move... do something fresh and new.'
When I look at music, everything is blurred, and I like it that way. I grew up like that, hanging out with different types of people who listened to so many different types of music. I never wanted to be part of any one clique. I loved it all.
It was quite nice to get an opportunity to introduce on the second album something a bit fresh for us. For the rest of the world, perhaps it's not, because guitar is quite ubiquitous, but for us it's exciting to just have guitar on the record.
The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits. It's better keeping the roots alive, because it means better fruits from now on. The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives, so will the blues.
"I’m not Catholic, I’m not Orthodox…" and I wouldn’t even say Rastafarian, that still divides people, I don’t want to divide people so anything that I say is something that must be so big and great that it did encompass everyone and it’s love.
There is a community in hip-hop. It doesn't seem like that anywhere else, except maybe in punk rock. But punk rock is tricky, because it has become such a pop thing. But in rap, there is still a feeling of community. Who are our peers? Rappers.
You have to kind of shift the way you look at life when you're in a group of people that you work with. It's not so much, do they make you feel good when you're around them all the time; it's how can you make everyone feel comfortable together.
There was a woman on the radio the other day who had wrote a book about how difficult it was in meetings once you're a working mother. She was like "Oh, You have baby sick on your business suit". Most people don't have a bloody business suit!!!
I threw a big-ass party. It turned out a bit different from Perry's [in That's Ordinary World], but it was pretty nuts. It wasn't me that threw it though, my wife threw me a surprise party. So [unlike Selma Blair's character] she didn't forget.
Did Muddy Waters play an acoustic? Well of course he did. But did he turn his back on being able to plug it in and play louder? No, he plugged in and turned it up and got miles and miles ahead of the game in one fateful act of just plugging in.
An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's AT somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you'll sort of be alright.
There's something about working in adverse conditions. It keeps it interesting. I always notice if I ever sit down with a pen and piece of paper and a guitar, and I have a beverage and an ashtray and I'm comfortable on the couch, I fall asleep.
Not for a million - years. I mean, I like the INXS boys, but I found the process very degrading, really. Reality television has eaten away at our standards of excellence. I don't like this whole culture, which has evolved, of TV being the king.
I love my country. I love my guns. I love my family. I love the way it is now, and anybody that tries to change it has to come through me. That should be all of our attitudes. Cause this is America, and a country boy is good enough for me, son.