Arnold Palmer Quotes

Even when I haven't played in a while, I can sit down and start with a chord, and just drop into it. It's like this tunnel I go into. The zone is where I want to live.

It is not a dreamlike state, but the somehow insulated state, that a great musician achieves in a great performance. He's aware of where he is and what he's doing, but his mind is on the playing of his instrument with an internal sense of rightness - it is not merely mechanical, it is not only spiritual; it is something of both, on a different plane and a more remote one.

I stand firm behind the belief that, for me, songwriting isn't something that I do or command, it happens to me. I can either choose to stop and acknowledge it, or put it off and hope that it won't fade away. 'That Wasn't Me' is no exception - it came together more quickly than any other song I have ever constructed on my own.

When you play with great musicians, whether they're schooled or self-taught, they keep you on your toes. It comes down to people's personalities and individual energies.

Ultimately, at the end of it, it's just trying to get into that space where you feel like you're hitting the right thing and you're making music. And it feels intuitive rather than being counterintuitive.

As long as I know what key the solo is in, I try to kind of empty my mind and not think about anything. I just play without thinking.

I cannot say what I think is right about music. I only know the rightness of it.

Like most musicians, I'm good at becoming immersed in the music that I am currently working on. We seldom lift up our heads to contemplate even the music we will be doing in the future, let alone what we've done in the past.

I think to say that meditation is helpful to artists is true and it's great, but it's also essentially helpful to any kind of process of, just, life.

I suppose that's why new music and I go well together, because new music often requires maintaining great rhythm.

When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.

Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great.

I don't set goals for myself too much, but I'm always trying to write that one great song.

Something different happens to my brain when I put pen to paper: the pace of writing or drawing slows you down and gives you more time for thoughts to come in.

I used to consider the listener. But now I'm in a space where, if I'm not inspired, I can't really do the music. I can't feel it.

I don't choose the songs; the songs choose me.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

When I play the clarinet, I am 100 percent myself. It is as if it is part of my body. I can play whatever I think. Let me just read a melody and make it as sweet as I can.

I am so highly skilled that when I pick up a phrase and then pick up my guitar, a form comes out almost immediately - a song - and once I start, I have to finish it.

Sometimes, I know it's not me that makes this music. Like, when the Based God comes, he speaks to me. It's not me, even though I'm there playing the music live, myself.

Conducting 'Tristan' is like floating in amniotic fluid, but having worked on it for three months, I now know why people who go near it go so strange.

I think about it as not so much 'I need to get it out of me,' it's not that my thoughts are poison, I just want to write good music.

I get into a zone where I'm really in my own world when I make music.

I feel like there are things that inspire the music, and then there's the music itself. I don't feel like I always need to force them together.

Of course we all know when music's too much in the head, and we define our greatest players by the way they are able to communicate directly from their emotional selves.