Quotes from John Zorn

I have about two or three people, we don't have an office, we don't even have a dedicated phone line. We do it out of our own homes, and we make it work.

As soon as you get a certain amount of attention, then everybody kinda wants to start taking pot shots at you. All your old friends that supported you don't support you any more.

Great musicians accept everything that they hear and find something good. They take what they like and they throw away what they don't like

I'm constantly tortured, and that's why I say happiness is irrelevant. Happiness is for children and yuppies.

The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive.

One thing that I do ask myself when I'm in the creative process is, 'Does the world need this?'

Man, Dick Dale shreds. He's welcomed to anybody's bar mitzvah.

I have not practiced saxophone since 1980. I mean, not one note. I do not pick it up in my house, and that's the end of it.

I see myself and many artists like me as the torchbearers through these dark ages.

I used to look at composing music as problem solving. But as I get older, it's not about problem solving anymore. There are no solutions, because there are no problems. You just turn the tap and it flows out.

You know, when we were kids, we had to go to a theater to see a movie. And then television came in and you had to wait until midnight to see the one you wanted to see. Now, all you've got to do is go to a store and buy it and you can watch it whenever you want!

And I try to be as diplomatic as I can, but it always ends up being a psychodrama up there on stage.

What happens when you get to the age of 60 is that you have no more doubts. I know why I'm here on this planet. I know what I need to do. I know what is a distraction and what isn't.

Eye was a great discovery. He is one of the great vocalists of all time.

It's a blast to watch. It's a lot more interesting live than it is on record. I mean, it really is a theatrical event. It's a sporting event! Cause you never know what's gonna happen.

I started the label Tzadik to support an entire community of musicians, not just Jewish musicians. But the radical Jewish culture movement was begun in a lot of ways because I wanted to take the idea that Jewish music equals 'klezmer' and expand it to, 'Well, Jewish music could be a lot more than that.'

If someone is a straight jazzhead, or a straight metalhead, or straight classical, they have a very narrow range of what they allow into their lives. But the people who listen to what we put out into the world have to be open-minded. Because we're so pluralist.

No one sits in front of a drum set and thinks they invented it all out of whole cloth. The fact that the set is there means that you've got some dues to pay to Baby Dodds.

I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together.

I'm getting ready to write a piece now, and it's been six months thinking about it, changing the instrumentation, changing the name, doing more reading.

Like you have seven people with their hands up. I gotta make a choice. Y'know, that's tough. Sometimes I gotta go with someone that has an idea and make several calls in a row, because they got an idea.

You can't sit down and write 300 compositions in a three-month period and think that you're doing it all by yourself. Obviously, there's something going on here. And whether you want to call it channeling or being connected to a creative force or knowing your history and knowing where you belong, that's, you know, maybe a personal thing.

Discipline is important as long as you're having a good time. What I always did was I did what I enjoyed, and I think that's why I don't have any grey hairs.

The magic that you find in surf music, I think, is really timeless. You know, when I was very young, I was in a surf band. Surf music is an instrumental music that still means a lot to me, not in an nostalgic way, but as something that really gets to the heart of the guitar itself.