Pierre Boulez Quotes

I am convinced that 100 years from now, people will talk about Elliott Carter as one of the most important figures in the second half of 20th-century music.

I don't want people buying my records for this summer's hit. I want people buying them because they're interested in what Ministry will have to say in the future.

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

Fifty years from now, people will still be listening to Led Zeppelin. They won't even remember me.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

The difference between me and the newer artists is that I have the history with the architects, the masters that started the music. I know where the music came from.

I'd like to be remembered as a keeper of the flame who kept traditional music alive, because I've been doing that twice as long as I was in the Byrds.

As far as the creative side of making great, great albums and really trying to go down in history? I don't see that happening lately, you know what I mean? You have a lot of guys is talented, but at the same time, timeless music is more important to me.

The New York that Frank Sinatra sang about, people will never know that place. The New Orleans that Louis Armstrong sang about is the New Orleans that's still there - it's preserved.

New York City has more rock history in its 305 square miles than most of America combined.

Bob Dylan was the source of pop music's unpredictability in the Sixties. Never as big a record-seller as commonly imagined, his importance was first aesthetic and social, and then as an influence.

So don't get me wrong, I love my songs, and I still love hearing them. That's history, baby.

As a composer, Dylan now fits comfortably alongside George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, though he grumpily refuses to wear any man's collar.

I was able to endure and play a special part in music history. And I always managed to keep working, even if I wasn't a big solo artist.

In New York, I'm around a lot of the reasons I started playing music in the first place. I live right behind Matt Umanov Guitars. I live on the street that Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan were walking down on the album cover. I recognize the history.

On Nov. 5, 2012, my friend Elliott Carter died in New York at the age of 103. For me, he was and remains one of the most interesting figures of music history in the past century.

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

I am not immune to the lure of a signed record, flier or set list. The fact that your music heroes potentially had, in their own hands, the record you now have in yours is kind of cool. When the musician has departed, it can give the thing a unique power.

None of the jazz greats made music for the purpose of you going to check out music before them. Michael Jackson didn't make music so you could go check out Sam Cooke.

Elvis Presley was the big bang. He was the most influential single figure in the history of American pop culture. He changed the way we looked, thought, dressed, held a guitar. He didn't invent rock & roll, but he defined it in a way that everyone who followed him owes him a debt.

No one has done what we've done. We're the first female band to have a No. 1 record.

All composers who came after were influenced by Beethoven, even during his lifetime, both by his personality and by his music. He was a father figure for generations.

The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

I just want my music to measure up to. Part of it's just thinking about my place in history and how this music is going to be perceived, if it's listened to 30, 40 years from now.

I would go back to the past and watch one of the early Beatles shows, because they were such a massive part of cultural history. As a younger person, you feel you missed out on that.