Sonny Rollins Quotes

In L.A., everybody ain't so nice.

I have a difficult relationship with jazz. My parents really love it, and I went to a school where jazz was considered the best thing ever, so I had to leave it be for a long time. But now I'm rediscovering it. I'm approaching jazz in a different way.

I don't have any bad feelings about L.A.

And I was a kid from L.A. and I just wanted to play thrash metal.

Living in L.A. has been really good for me as a creator and musician.

I don't have very eclectic tastes in music.

As I've gotten older, as I've gotten familiar with all different types of music, stuff that I didn't like when I was younger I actually kind of like now.

I played at Room 5 a lot, which is probably the smallest capacity venue in Los Angeles. I begged my friends to come see me.

Back in 1981, the chances of a punk-rock girl band from L.A. doing what we did was completely nil.

My music is influenced by L.A. culture.

The early music I heard was Top of the Pops. But in bedrooms, around the house with my brother playing the Sex Pistols, Sham 69 and the Ham and all these groups then going into that sort of mod turnover scene and then going into the New Romantics scene the coming of age myself in the mid-eighties and into the noughties, it was changing.

I don't know if i have a 'take' on L.A. The music community is enormous, from the studio musicians to the bands trying to 'make it' to the indie bands... so many bands... it can be overwhelming. But it seems healthy.

Los Angeles produced the Beach Boys. Dusseldorf produced Kraftwerk. New York produced Chic. Manchester produced Joy Division.

If I were to say that I grew up in East Los Angeles in the projects, poor, I assumed that everybody understood that it came with its own reasons for being the way I am. I didn't get that people needed to understand where my comedy came from; I thought that they knew that.

In L.A., we played rock venues because we had a band, which hip-hop venues couldn't accommodate. And within that, we created a show which we could put on in front of anybody.

The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.

There is also a kind of mean-spiritedness with LA comics.

Black is not sad... Black is poetic.

You come to a country music show and it's like a rock show, it's so different, it's just not what people think it is, it's really cool and I think that if people just give it a chance they'd see that it's really cool and I think that's what people are finally starting to see.

In some contexts in Pakistan maybe a beard is negative. It depends. And in some contexts in America maybe a beard is positive. I think there's certainly lots of hipster communities where having a beard makes me look a little bit less like a, you know, middle-aged fuddy-duddy. And there's some places in Pakistan where having a beard, you know, certain corporate contexts, certain social contexts, where it's not an advantage to have a beard.

Anxiety and hostility seem to be a great part of good and bad humor. Examining humor too closely does seem to destroy it.

And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.

What I wanted to do was music, until I was about 16. But it was jazz and rock, never classical music.

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.

You had to hate the Colonel a whole lot to keep from loving him.