 Even if you're specific about the character of the song, it's more exciting to place them, juxtapose them in such a way as to make an adventure out of the sequence of the songs. |
| When there is a voice in a piece of music, we tend to focus on the voice. That is probably something from when we were babies and we depended on hearing our mother's voice. |
| This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome. |
| What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done. |
| I really liked them, not just Syd, but all of them. Roger was very important, I thought, his contribution. And so was Rick's organ playing. It was a good band. It became something else completely, obviously. |
| The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality. |
| Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world. |
| I only choose musicians who I think will emerge, can emerge, with their own character, while still going along with the tune in question. |
| I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest. |
| I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar. |
| Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't. |
| Love is blind. My politics has been, too. I think you can fall in love with ideas, and you can fall in love with people. It's a very subjective experience. And I'm loyal to that experience. |
| There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz. |
| I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers. |
| I'm not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I'm sorry that I've done a Neil Diamond song. |
| My heroes are people like Picasso and Miro and people who at last really reach something in their old age, which they absolutely couldn't ever have done in their youth. |
| When I'm singing I try not be a singer with a capital S. I just try to get it out so I feel comfortable with it. |
| I find it hard to take rock groups very seriously or treat them with respect. There is something absurd about these gloomy young men getting together and banging away. |
| There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas. |
| In the past, so many of my records, really, have been sketches for records that never really got made. |
