Quotes About Influence

My thing is I'd love to be friends with Thom Yorke but if he wasn't a nice guy it would ruin everything for me, I probably wouldn't be able to listen to his music.

I think pop music has done more for oral intercourse than anything else that has ever happened, and vice versa.

The muse of music isn't just from Greek mythology, but living in people like the Beatles, Chuck Berry, Anita Baker, Aretha Franklin.

I've grown up with my parents' music tastes, listening to Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones.

I'd listened to [Ornette Coleman] all kinds of ways. I listened to him high and I listened to him cold sober. I even played with him. I think he's jiving baby.

But I did go to music really early on, even when I was 4 or 5, I was responding to music probably in ways other kids were not.

I see myself in pop culture. I listen to pop music, I do pop things, and I'm also a scientist.

In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.

Music commands how we feel, dictates what we experience in our feelings.

Politics can be strengthened by music, but music has a potency that defies politics.

Kids on the Youtube, learning how to be cool.

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

All these kids who are growing up on Skrillex and all this digital music- what are they gonna think when they hear rock'n'roll?

My goal was always to be involved in music that would outlive me. And maybe that's actually happening.

Smokey Robinson is one of my heroes as a singer and songwriter, a major influence on my own music from the very start.

I like African music, and I'm a huge Ravi Shankar fan.

I always have my own music on my iPod, especially songs that I am going to record. Besides that, I have lots of others ranging from Chris Brown to Beyonce', Michael Jackson, Rascal Flatts and Adele.

I've always felt that rock & roll was very, very wholesome.

I believe the history of American music is just as important as anything political because it's changed generations of people.

The biggest musical influence on me was my mum. We were both enraptured by music.

Dizzy used to tell me I'm playing too hard. He'd say to not give everything. Miles told me that too.

I love Black Sabbath. They made an amazing contribution to music today. Almost every band that made it big in the Nineties owed a debt to them.

I think America concedes that true American music has sprung from the Negro.

I think Kurt Cobain and Nirvana represent this giant wave that came crashing in and turned music on its head again, and there's definitely something to be said for that.