Philip Glass Quotes

And as long as people want to hear me sing, I don't know why I'd retire.

I actually grew up wanting to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make movies, and music was a detour, almost.

Now I get exposure first with people directly in the clubs. This is a unique situation for me.

When you are in your 20's and 30's, you just want a hit record and you don't really care how it happens.

I hate fame. There's this assumption that everyone wants it - that by being a musician, I've signed up for it at some point. But personally, what I signed up for is sharing my music. I've always said I'd rather have four No. 10 songs than one No. 1 hit.

In the mid-1980s to the early 1990s I was writing songs not because I particularly liked what I was doing, but because I was desperately trying to get back into the charts. I really didn't enjoy it. I didn't like the music I was making, I wasn't proud of it, like I have been before or since.

Music is something I do full-time in real life. I was doing music long before I was even thinking about acting.

When you make work, your goal might not be first and foremost to have as many people as possible see it, but it might be more about honing your craft as a storyteller or making art, but, there's no doubt about it, you want lots of people to see it.

This business is about working. It's really not about glamour. For me, the most glamorous thing about it is to b able to get on stage and perform my music for people. That's the privilege. And that's what all the work leads up to, and that's why it's worth it to me.

If I have an audience, I'd like to make music for my whole life. But it's not really up to me.

That would really be my fantasy - maybe just do three shows a year and each year in a different city, just singing for the people who really want to see it, and then just write for other people. I do love to sing, but I'm just as happy singing in the bathtub, you know?

My dream that I followed and that I'm living now is that I actually always wanted to go to music college, play in a band, do a world tour, and then eventually get into film music.

When you first start out in the music business and hope that you have a couple hits, the ultimate payoff is to be standing in front of all those people who are singing it back to you at the top of their lungs. And you know by the way they're singing it back that it's affected their life in some way. That's the ultimate reward as an artist for me.

I just look to make great music and garner the love the people have always been kind enough to give me.

I'm out here living my dream. People are listening to my music.

I never really wanted to base success on charts and chart positioning. For me, it's really about the shows and seeing them grow.

We think accolades are nice, awards are great, but we make music for the people.

Originally, I thought of being a photographer and nearly went to art school, but I got a record deal instead.

I wrote all the time, but the idea of doing it professionally seemed like pie in the sky. Who gets paid to write? I grew up in Pittsburgh, so it wasn't really a notion that a lot of people pursue.

I know a lot of bands that will make their first record and get to a certain level, and then when the second record comes out, they can start where they left off as a headlining act playing in front of a certain number of people, or they can go back out and make a lot less money and open for people. I feel like if you go out and just go right back into that headlining stuff, you're playing to the converted.

I just want to write good songs that people love, which is a tough thing to do.

A lot of people, even my parents, thought, "Art school, I don't know. We'll support you but the success rate for artists is really slim."

I don't think I would ever be a doctor, but the reason I majored in science was because you could become a civil engineer, you could become a biologist, you could become a computer scientist - that was the point of it. I had no idea what I wanted to do. In my last two years of high school here happened to be these few scripts that I really responded to. Eventually, I landed the job, and that was something that I felt transcended whatever other people would think of me.

There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.

As far as in my adult life, it kinda started (with) writing first 'cause I went to school in Nashville. I mean, not Nashville but close to Nashville, and I met my managers in L.A. at a convention randomly. And then, it kinda just started from there. And then, I got my publishing deal.