Quotes About Perception

I could only use the formula I knew. Which was, you call a song 'China Girl', it better sound Asian. You call a song 'Let's Dance', you damn well better make sure people dance to it.

You haven't read anything until you've comprehended it.

With music, you often don't have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don't know why.

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shackAnd you may find yourself in another part of the worldAnd you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobileAnd you may find yourself in a beautiful house… with a beautiful wifeAnd you may ask yourself, "Well… how did I get here?"

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community.

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

You can know or not know how a car runs and still enjoy riding in a car.

There are two conversations going on at the same time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told.

Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects.

Some of you people just about missed it

Presuming that there is such a thing as "progress" when it comes to music, and that music is "better" now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn't "improve.

One forgets that part of one's performance is one's history—or sometimes the lack of it. You're playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there's baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can't see.

Facts just twist the truth around.

According to the science writer Philip Ball, when it was pointed out to musicologist Deryck Cooke that Slavic and much Spanish music use minor keys for happy music, he claimed that their lives were so hard that they didn't really know what happiness was anyway.

I would hope very much that the converse of that myth isn't true - that one does not have to be nuts to be creative.

Some say this evanescence helps focus our attention. They claim that we listen more closely when we know we only have one chance, one fleeting moment to grasp something, and as a result our enjoyment is deepened.

Yale, pointed out that once you let yourself see things this way, lots of things become "musical scores"—although they might never have been intended to be played.

You can't touch music—it exists only at the moment it is being apprehended—and yet it can profoundly alter how we view the world and our place in it.

The technology is useful and convenient, but it has, in the end, reduced its own value and increased the value of the things it has never been able to capture or reproduce.

we now think of the sound of recordings when we think of a song or piece of music, and the live performance of that same piece is now considered an interpretation of the recorded version. What was originally a simulation of a performance—the recording—has supplanted performances, and performances are now considered the simulation.

One forgets that part of one's performance is one's history—or sometimes the lack of it. You're playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there's baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can't see.