Quotes About Influence

The music you love when you're a teenager is always going to be the most important to you.

I want people to hear musicians like Joe Cuba. He has done things to whole masses of Puerto Rican people. The music is fantastic and important.

We all grew up idolizing another musician. That's how this works. That's how music is created.

Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.

I think it's real important that people understand where the music comes from. If you can see where the music comes from, you can also see the future. It gives you a trajectory.

One thing that I always liked about fashion was that it was tied in with music and art and film.

When you create something you leave little crumbs of stuff that you've experienced or music that you've listened to.

If someone can write great music... Paul McCartney is a genius. He's so prolific. All we should do is bow down to Paul McCartney.

Holland is to dance music what Nashville is to country.

If it hadn't been for Jazz, there wouldn't be no rock and roll.

Music is all about leadership and there ain't really a lot of leaders.

I always hope that my music can inspire someone, the same way other artists inspire me.

All my music is inspirational. You just gotta listen to the words and get what you can get out of it.

Seeing TVXQ's music and stage makes me feel touched, and they're a very good influence on us.

The music of your youth stays with you throughout your life.

I don't really listen to Radiohead. I listened to the albums and they just didn't move me in the way, say, John Prine does. His is just extraordinarily eloquent music.

You know, if Michael Jordan can scream at the refs, me as Kanye West, as the Michael Jordan of music, can go and say, 'This is wrong.'

I've always loved black culture; I don't know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone.

Theres two kinds of music: black soul music, and the white imitation thereof.

Trance had become a dirty word. Thanks to Ian Van Dahl, Lasgo, Flip 'N' Fill and DJ Sammy, a generation of kids has grown up thinking trance is the shittiest music since country and western.

I think Andy Kaufman is to comedy what the Velvet Underground was to music - it's like, 80 thousand records sold, but everybody who bought one started a band.

I think the legacy I'll leave on music is just an artist that went out here and gave 100%.

He stole my music but he gave me my name.

It may be that my most helpful contributions to music aren't my compact discs but my articles about other great singers of the past for American Heritage magazine.