Fred Armisen Quotes

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.

Todd Rundgren is a genius, and I don't use that word a lot.

Mozart was very much an arrested adolescent.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

I'm a genius. I'm like Prince.

The thing that's tricky is sometimes the best voices - just because someone hits the big notes and sounds amazing - it doesn't necessarily mean they make the greatest artists.

I'd love to work with Sufjan Stevens. He so gets it. He's amazing.

I really don't think I have that much of the gift; I have a little bit, but I wish I were Schubert or Chopin or Beethoven, though Beethoven had a very difficult time writing melody, too.

The guy that I worked on 'Thriller ' was a genius and he was 20 years old, but it was like working with a gifted 10-year-old. The guy who I worked on with 'Black Or White' was crazy. Michael had gone mad.

I'm very strong creatively, in my music.

In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does what it can.

Hendrix was a natural genius who played many beautiful styles. Talent as great as his doesn't come through life very frequently. Hendrix was one in a billion.

I always think of Gilbert Norrell as being Salieri to Jonathan Strange being Mozart.

It seems like if they'd given Bob Dylan a pen and paper in the cradle that he would've come up with a great song. I'd love to write songs like that.

I don't feel like we have that Paul McCartney gene, and I think the cool thing about us is that we know it.

You could be a music prodigy at age 4, like Mozart, but you can't be a writing prodigy.

I’m in awe of McCartney. He’s about the only one that I am in awe of. He can do it all. And he’s never let up... He’s just so damn effortless.

Mozart starved, but you allow Thalberg and Liszt make tons of gold: Of course, you may think that someone immortal cannot die of hunger

People are born with the knack to write poems and songs. I'm not a poet at all.

I play piano, by ear. Yes, I write songs... and good ones.

Genius now and then produces a lucky trifle. We still read the Dove of Anacreon, and Sparrow of Catullus; and a writer naturally pleases himself with a performance which owes nothing to the subject.

No matter how many people try, no matter how many fancy songwriters in Los Angeles try to break it down to a formula... to an extent, there isn't a science to writing great songs, I suppose.

Phillip is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead.

In the end, I get a really good song, and in the end, I get the hits. Yeah, I'm that good.