Nick Mason Quotes

Actually, music gave me the support when I needed it. I would never have gone to college unless I'd gotten a piano scholarship. And now I'm so glad I got to learn to play the cello, which is a different experience, you're flexing a different muscle, but it's beautiful because it is music.

You see, that is it with music, you never stop learning.

When I was 15, 16, 17 years old, I spent five hours a day juggling, and I probably spent six hours a day seriously listening to music. And if I were 16 now, I would put that time into playing video games.

A friend of mine once told me that I can't screw up when I play my own music. I also take voice lessons, play other peoples' songs out of music books, and occasionally figure out how to play other people's music from records. This keeps my ears, fingers, and mind working.

For me, learning is a continuous process and an all-inclusive one - reading a book, learning a musical instrument or learning the martial art called taekwondo. Teach myself something new - that's my prayer.

I started studying piano at the age of four.

I started playing on my grandmother's organ at a really young age. I learned 'Chopsticks' and that kind of thing, but I didn't really start picking it up and start taking it super seriously until I was probably about 13, 14.

I self-taught myself music at 19-20.

Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else's footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.

The average American watches more than four hours of television per day. What would happen if we spent more time developing our talents than watching others develop theirs?

When one has talent, everything contributes to its development.

I wrote and directed and acted in it and produced it, every job I have since that - and Star Wars included - I look at it completely different now. Now that I've seen how it gets made, I can appreciate the jobs that people are doing, and it's also become a different learning experience for me to work on things because I'm watching pros at the top of their field do their jobs and just picking up on their tricks and all of their expertise and stashing them away in my brain.

Creativity can be learned like basketball, which does not mean we will all be NBA stars.

The best education you can get is investing in yourself, and that doesn't mean college or university.

If I don't know how to swim and two weeks later I know how to swim, I know how to swim.

The Hollywood I know has allowed me the opportunity after opportunity to keep doing new things and not send me out to pasture. I don't want to go to pasture. It's cold. I'm allergic to grass. And the cows are mean.

You don't find geniuses in street musicians, but that doesn't mean to say you can't be really good.

There's always music that moves me. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's within the parenthesis of rock or blues, or whatever. It's usually far more reaching than that. It can be in many different genres.

Leading is a skill, not a gift. You're not born with it, you learn how.

Nothing is so improving to the temper as the study of the beauties either of poetry, eloquence, music, or painting.

But the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

It takes a lot of things to work together in order to be wealthy but with a little luck, a lot of luck... You've got to be good at something. For a 20-year-old, you don't have to know exactly what you want to do, you've just got to go find something you can be great at, and then go be great at it.

It's really rubbish that some kind of "technical" learning means you will be a better person because you know this skill better.

At 42, I decided to become a photographer because it offered a means of creative thought and action. I didn't rationalize this, I just felt it intuitively and followed my intuition, which I have never regretted.

No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.