Musical Analogy Quotes

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

In essence, String Theory describes space and time, matter and energy, gravity and light, indeed all of God's creation... as music.

I enjoy playing the audience like a piano.

Technically I feel total fluidity in writing. I feel there's nothing technically that I can't do the way a certain sort of pianist feels that. But that doesn't mean it comes easily. It doesn't.

Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.

The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.

I was a really good youth boxer, and I enjoyed the sport very much. Once I actually started to play the trumpet, it is very similar to boxing. Most of the great trumpet players boxed: Miles Davis was a boxer, Wallace Roney is a boxer, Terrence Blanchard is a boxer. In a boxing ring, no one can help you. It's just you and the other guy, and your job is to get him out of there, to outscore him in the best sense of it. When you learn to box, the first thing they teach you is to protect yourself at all times, and some people also learn that they like being hit.

The soul is like a violin string: it makes music only when it is stretched.

I'm a big believer that an actor should be able to pick up any piece of material and act it, the way a good musician can.

The Bible is like a bull fiddle, you can play almost any tune you want on it.

I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.

As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table.

I have always stood in awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel.

Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.

Men think God is destroying them because he is tuning them. The violinist screws up the key till the tense cord sounds the concert pitch; but it is not to break it, but to use it tunefully, that he stretches the string upon the musical rack.

Comedy is like music. You have to know the key and you have to find players with good chops.

Sometimes when I do a joke and it doesn't get a lot of laughs, it kind of feels like I'm doing jazz. That's kinda cool because jazz is cool, but sometimes jazz sucks ... Maybe I'm the Kenny G of comedy.

Ethics are more important than laws. Which means that the exact note is less important than the feeling of the note.

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

To play your colors by eye is worse than playing the piano by ear.

The seasons are what a symphony ought to be: four perfect movements in harmony with each other.

I think the key that differentiates the good actors from the mediocre ones that are still trying to come up, is that the good ones know how to listen. It's like being in a jazz band. They know how to listen to what the other musicians are playing. And where to come in and where to sit out. That's my approach to being in an ensemble cast and working with any kind of actors in a scene.