All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.

It was during my enchanted days of travel that the idea came to me, which, through the years, has come into my thoughts again and again and always happily—the idea that geology is the music of the earth.

The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano. What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.

You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instrumentsproducing a confused agreeable massof sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.

I had tried marijuana several times, but in the words of my friend and longtime assistant Janet Stark, “When I smoke pot, it makes me want to hide under the bed with a box of graham crackers and not share.

You kind of attribute this magic to music and as you meet the people you realize that they don’t contain the magic. They just channel it a little bit sometimes, but they never possess it. They never own it.

Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.

So time over time what will change the world, no one knows? The only promise is a day to live, to give and share with one another.
 See the wisdom from mistakes in our past; the promise of a new day.


I wanted to smell the guitars. It's hard to explain but they have a smell. And the best way I could ever describe it would be to say they smell like potential. Ambition and desire. If such things had a smell.

Cause when I hear your name I can not stop cheesing I love you so much that my heart stops beating when you're leaving And I'm grieving and my heart starts bleeding Life without you has no goddamn meaning

Let me tell you something: when you dance, you are the greatest dancer who has ever lived. And when you sing, you will have the courage to raise your voice to the heavens, knowing that you may never get an answer.

Lost again Broken and weary Unable to find my way Tail in hand Dizzy and clearly unable to Just let this go I am surrendering to gravity and the unknown Catch me heal me lift me back up to the sun I choose to live

Southern girls are God's gift to the entire male population. There is absolutely no woman finer than one raised below the mason-dixon line and once you go southern may the good Lord help you - you never go back

To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. Someday the sky would be emptied, but by then the earth would be a constellation of musical scores