Tom Lehrer Quotes

It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.

Mozart was very much an arrested adolescent.

Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

If you're going to be a myth or want to be a myth, you'd better die young.

Fifty years from now I'll be just three inches of type in a record book.

Whom the gods love dies young.

My audience is going to die before I do.

To be a legend, you've either got to be dead or excessively old!

Age makes all things greater after their death; a name comes to the tongue easier from the grave.

My nieces and my nephews think the only thing that I do is 'Ice Age.' That's fine with me because pretty soon they'll grow up enough to realize that I suck or that my time has passed, whichever it might be.

If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.

A lucky thing Eva Peron was. She died at 32. I'm already 45.

It's irrelevant to me what young Singaporeans think of me. I've lived long enough to know that you may be idealised in life and reviled after you're dead.

I started playing the violin at age 3, and I was very fortunate because there were people who heard me who were influential in getting me auditions. By the time I was 7, I was playing concerts - it was just ridiculous.

I lost a dear friend of mine from a rugby injury at 26. We don't usually deal with mortality at that early age and it's given me an appreciation of time, of trying to fit everything in.

If you want to become a myth, you had better die young.

I've had a wonderful life. What people are going to write about me 10 years after I'm dead - who cares?

I always think Hank Williams knew that he was going to die young, and that's why he did that much work.

The deep waters of time will flow over us: only a few men of genius will lift a head above the surface, and though doomed eventually to pass into the same silence, will fight against oblivion and for a long time hold their own.

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

Money won't change you, but time will take you out.

You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

Now he belongs to the ages.

Suicide is what everyone young thinks they'll do before they get old. But they hardly ever get round to it. They just don't want to commit themselves in that way. When you're young and you look ahead, time ends in mist at twenty-five. 'Old won't happen to me', you say. But old does. Oh, old does. Old always gets you in the end.