Ali Shaheed Muhammad Quotes

For now the poet cannot die, Nor leave his music as of old, But round him ere he scarce be cold Begins the scandal and the cry.

Years from now, after I'm gone, someone will listen to what I've done and know I was here. They may not know or care who I was, but they'll hear my guitars speaking for me.

I would rather be remembered by a song than by a victory.

I want to write music that will outlive me.

I believe the artist has an obligation to society.

When you write a song, a song has longevity.

The most valiant thing you can do as an artist is inspire someone else to be creative.

I want to make music that stands the test of time.

All I owe the world is my art.

When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do.

You look back at people like Elvis and The Beatles and still get their music because it's timeless. That's what I want.

That, for me, is the only real legacy: the idea that one has left a lingering trace in people's memories. In the end, that's all a director can hope to do.

I leave everyone to have their own opinions of my music and my influence - or not - on others.

We think it's a blessing that we were able to bring our music to the world. That our music has not only inspired our communities but other communities. That's one of the greatest things an artist in any field could know: that you've touched the mind of another artist.

[I want to be] Something that really touched you - and as far as image and change goes, I just really want a lot of people to respect my music and treat me... [as] inspiration.

So to make movies, if you're first goal is to make money, well you can! Make a tent-pole movie that China wants. But that's not the kind of thing that's really going to get your remembered. You're not going to change anything with that. You might become rich from it!

My works are dear to me, each in its own way, I shall have to answer for them on the Day off Judgement. God alone knows whether I shall ever see them again. Quite apart from the money which I was going to receive for their sale there (exhibition in Gallery Der Sturm, Berlin June-July, 1914) and it is no small sum.

In fact, the influence of Schoenberg may be overwhelming on his followers, but the significance of his art is to be identified with influences of a more subtle kind - not the system, but the aesthetic, of his art. I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written.

If painters left nothing of themselves after their deaths, so that we were obliged to rank them as we do actors according to the judgment of their contemporaries, how different their reputations would be from what posterity has made them!

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind.

It's a kind of honour when I see how many people are imitating the style of how I make films.

I'm not making any absurd comparisons between myself and Bach, but I aspire to that, that my music will have the legs to survive whatever context it finds itself in.

In the physical universe, there are objects that include suns, planets, all life, and all matter in all dimensions. And then there is the space where all these things exist. That space is the vital element. For virtually every kid since 1968 who picked up a guitar to find his voice on the instrument, Jimmy Page has been the space that enables all our notes to be played.

The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact.