I think people who truly can live a life in music are telling the world, ‘You can have my love, you can have my smiles. Forget the bad parts, you don’t need them. Just take the music, the goodness, because it’s the very best, and it’s the part I give most willingly

My hands moved up and down the keyboard, summoning great waves of music, each one crested with sorrow, loneliness, and anger. Tides of emotion rose and fell, gradually finding their way down my arms and to the keys, becoming harmonies that filled and then dissipated into the air like mist.

Texting and phone calls, fireworks, blends, café au lait, and music. Yesterday's television. Work and beer. The neighbor's dog, or those strange flowers, the way it smells at Maisen. Those ordinary things I talk about with you. With you... I want to talk about love with you.

I just got a world record. It has music from Europe, Asia, North America, all over the globe. Michael Phelps also has a world record, but you can’t dance to it like you can mine. And after we dance, we can make love like Michael Phelps makes retired people look oh so youthful and fit.

In the hall itself the din of the music - for this is the real way to play a jukebox and what it was originally for - was so tremendous that it shattered Dean and Stan and me for a moment in the realization that we had never dared to play music as we wanted, and this was how loud we wanted.

He knows how to market himself well. Nowadays, that's all that seems to count. He's rebellious in a way that appeals to people with vain, shallow taste. So of course he manipulates his audiences with the blessing of his recording company and the financial investors behind his brand.

A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.

Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lostmemories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreamsplay when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?

I Remember Years Ago, Someone Told Me I Should Take Caution When it Comes to Love, I DidSo Tell Them All I Know NowShout it From the RooftopsWrite it On the Sky LineAll We Had Is Gone NowTell Them I Was Happyand My Heart is BrokenAll My Scars Are OpenTell Them What I Hoped Would BeImpossible

All the shopping malls and restaurants and airports are riddled with low-fidelity loudspeakers which apparently have developed the ability to reproduce by themselves; these are all connected to a special programming service called Music That Nobody Really Likes and you cannot get away from it

The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.

I don't want to feel you die,but if that's the way that God has planned youWell, I'll put pennies on your eyes.And it will go away, see?You've only lived a minute of your life.I must be dreaming...Is someone calling me? No...I think I hear a voice,They're outside the door!

It felt like one of those perfect moments where everything comes together. But like I said, I don't believe in accidents. Even if this strange, musical moment, the final result of a long chain of unlikely events, never came to anything else, it was meant to be.Something new had been born.

Music is a total constant. That’s why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment.

Then I played the song that hides in the center of me. That wordless music that moves through the secret places in my heart. I played it carefully, strumming it slow and low into the dark stillness of the night. I would like to say it is a happy song, that it is sweet and bright, but it is not.