Tom Glazer Quotes

The cool thing about writing music, writing anything, is that once you publish it, it's there forever.

The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.

Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I'm very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I've probably already written it.

Even if the flower is no more, still, the fragrance can be.

We're all just songs in the end. If we are lucky.

A great reputation is a great noise, the more there is of it, and the further does it swell. Land, monuments, Nations, all fall, but the noise remains, and will reach to other generations.

You may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he.

One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting.

We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.

Life and death, union and separation, follow hard upon one another. Nothing is steadfast but the will, nothing endures but one's achieve­ments. These alone count in life.

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

In human life there is constant change of fortune; and it is unreasonable to expect an exemption from the common fate. Life itself decays, and all things are daily changing.

When you do something that works you have a happiness, but I don't know if it's a feeling of power. Power is a frightening thing and that's not what I'm interested in. I want to do certain things and make them right in my mind and that's it.

The need has gone; the memorial thereof remains.

As you were, I was. As I am, you will be.

The game is always going to be bigger than the man and it doesn't matter what you are doing; records or whatever, somebody is just going to come along and break your records. But to achieve something that people would always look up to is something you will always appreciate.

Money comes, money goes. But your story stays with you the rest of your life.

You run the risk of falling on your face, but, again, music is an individual pursuit - it is made to please yourself first.

How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

My songs will pass and be forgotten. What counts, however, is that I sang them.

I don't know what the hell I'm doing; I like what I've been doing. I believe in what I've done in the past; I hope my kid enjoys the movies I've made and enjoys some of the movies in the future.