Lee Konitz Quotes

My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.

I try to steal something from the great singers. Of course, I don't want to imitate their sound, but I try to do a sort of compromise.

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

I've had so many different influences musically, even from people who aren't even musicians. If you're inspired by someone and you document it musically, then they are your influence.

I don't get so much inspiration from other musicians. Especially alive musicians. Late musicians are good - Bach, Beethoven - yes, good.

As a musician, it's only natural that my music mirrors my life.

Right at the end of the war I wrote a piano sonata, which was written at a time when Sam Barber used to come down here and we used to have lunch together in a very nice old hotel that's now not there.

Honest, I listen to classical mostly. It keeps my mind fresh to write rock songs.

Living in a capital in Europe but still surrounded by mountains and ocean, my relationship to music was strongest walking to school and back. I would sing to myself and very quickly started mapping out my melodies to landscapes - at the time I just thought it was very matter of fact, a common thing to do.

I recognize very much in Hopper that it does look like the United States; it looks like the 30's and my first impressions of everything, all of which I have to deal with and which gets mixed up in my work and probably gets mixed up in everybody else's work too.

In my view, the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.

Artists who write songs... what they're going through usually comes through in their music.

I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas.

I get a different kind of lyric from someone else that might make me go in a different musical direction.

I don't get my inspiration from a specific source. It's more like if you listen to a good tune, it gives me inspiration to write a better tune.

I start listening to something, or I'm seeing somebody a lot or seeing their art. And then I just really want to make a picture of them.

I've never really been schooled in music theory. I'm a guitar player, and I attack the guitar in a certain way that it not fully unique to me, but it's more unique that some other people.

When I write songs, it's very random. I get influenced by the most random things! Sometimes it just comes to me in my sleep or just hanging out in a restaurant or something. Music just comes to me, and I'll start writing from there.

We don't need another Woody. Even Bob Dylan knew he couldn't be Woody Guthrie... I like Woody Guthrie fine, but I don't need the 50th generation version of it.

I went through a pretty big David Bowie period when I was younger, and that has affected me profoundly in my life and my work.

I agree totally with Metheny regarding the sound influencing the way you play.

You boil down your influences to a soup, and it all informs you.

Music should come from the heart. It should happen. That should be automatic, and if you labour on creating music, it will not have soul.

We just try to write about things that are close to our hearts. We don't sit around trying to write another 'Free Bird' or 'Sweet Home Alabama.'

How did I write 'Spin Me?' I listened to Luther Vandross's 'I Wanted Your Love.'