La musique doit humblement chercher à faire plaisir, l'extrême complication est le contraire de l'art

Bad music is what will ruin music, not the instruments musicians choose to play.

La musique savante manque à notre désir

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.

When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed its point.

If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.

I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you've not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.

But let none, he added, pray to have the full music; for it will make him who hears it a footsore traveller in

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.

How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.

What can a man do with music who is not benevolent?

Il suffit que nous bouchions nos oreilles au son de la musique, dans un salon où l'on danse, pour que les danseurs nous paraissent aussitôt ridicules. Combien d'actions humaines résisteraient à une épreuve de ce genre?