"I write as a sow piddles."
MOZART

"My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer."
COLE PORTER

"Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already."
MAHLER to Bruno Walter who had stopped to admire a mountain

"I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve."
XAVIER COUGAT

"Musicians talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time.
At least they are interested in music and art."
SIBELIUS, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home.

"The amount of money one needs is terrifying..."
BEETHOVEN

"Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living."
KIRKE MECHAM on his life as a composer, rumoured also to have been said by MARILYN HORNE

"Chaos is a friend of mine."
BOB DYLAN

"There is nothing more difficult than talking about music."
SAINT-SAENS

"I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet."
NICOLAI PAGANINI

"Of course I'm ambitious. What's wrong with that? Otherwise you sleep all day."
RINGO STARR

"Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats."
VICTOR BORGE, playing to a half-filled house

"If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation."
OSCAR WILDE

"Critics can't make music even by rubbing their back legs together."
MEL BROOKS

"life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas
and listen to them for ten years."
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR

"You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow."
OSCAR LEVANT, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket.

"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
MARK TWAIN

"I love Beethoven, especially the poems."
FAMOUS ROCK MUSICIAN WHO SHALL REMAIN ANONYMOUS...

"Berlioz may say nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently."
FAMOUS AUTHOR WHO SHALL REMAIN ANONYMOUS...

"If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that,
in five years he will be ready to commit murder."
WALTER DAMROSCH on AARON COPLAND

"There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major."
PROKOFIEV

"I never use a score when conducting my orchestra...
Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?"
DIMITRI MITROPOLOUS

"God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way."
TOSCANINI berating a trumpet player

"Already too loud!"
BRUNO WALTER at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra,
on seeing the players reaching for their instruments.

"I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris,
or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere."
CHOPIN

"When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano."
BOB HOPE on comedienne Phyllis Diller

"Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them."
RICHARD STRAUSS

"In opera, there is always too much singing."
DEBUSSY

"An exotic and irrational entertainment."
SAMUEL JOHNSON'S definition of opera

"If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it."
BEAUMARCHAIS commenting on The Barber of Seville

"Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings."
ROBERT BENCHLEY

"I'd hate this to get out, but I really like opera."
FORD FRICK

"Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!"
ROSSINI

"I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century
to have made giant strides in reverse."
BING CROSBY

"It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness."
JERRY GARCIA

"A ponderous orchestral absurdity."
FRANK ZAPPA on his rock symphony, which debuted with the Los Angeles Philharmonic

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