Quotes About Talent

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

I'll tell you what I would do in a shot if I could. I would sing in the barbershop quartet in The Music Man.

I don't believe in geniuses, I believe in hard work.

If 'Pygmalion' is not good enough for your friends with its own verbal music, their talent must be altogether extraordinary.

I was meant to be a composer and will be I'm sure. Don't ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football - please.

I've never had a real job in my life. I didn't learn anything, I was terrible at school. It was just this thing. Music was all I wanted to do.

If you want to play piano, you just gotta love piano, and I loved the way that music sounded from the beginning. Always did - everything about an instrument I loved.

Ry Cooder for me is a master, a great master that has a wonderful feel for Cuban music. He's also paid tribute my talent a bit, even though I don't know half of what he knows.

A chimpanzee could learn what I do physically, but it goes way beyond that. When you play, you play life.

I never took sheet music seriously. I could do better myself just by listening to other people and using my own intuition.

The Beach Boys are not a superstar group. The music is the superstar of the group.

Music comes from the musician, not the instrument.

If you play music for no other reason than actually just because you love it, the skills just kinda creep up on you.

If there's any such thing as a perfect man, I think John Coltrane was one. And I think that kind of perfection has to come from a greater force than there is here on earth.

You can't steal a gift. Bird [Charlie Parker] gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.

I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.

I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.

Music is a right, but only for those who deserve it!

Every day I lugged my backpack through the halls, waiting for the final bell. Then I'd race home and hole up in my room, playing the drums and the piano, composing music.

Over the years I hope I've become more of a musican and less of a guitarist.

If a guy's got it, let him give it. I'm selling music, not prejudice.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

Put out great music, and that's that

I always felt I never chose music, it chose me.