Tom Lehrer Quotes

It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.

When I'm dead, gone or whatever, people will always remember my name and the music I did during my time.

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

There's this Bruno Mars guy. I met him in Hawaii when was doing Elvis imitations at the age of about five or six years old. There's a lot of old school in him. He's got a depth that I just love.

Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.

When they look back on me I want 'em to remember me not for all my wives, although I've had a few, and certainly not for any mansions or high livin' money I made and spent. I want 'em to remember me simply for my music.

You can't do sports for the rest of your life; I don't care how good you are. You can be the best ever, but it's still going to go away.

But I've got to think of myself as the luckiest guy. Robert Johnson only had one album's worth of work as his legacy. That's all that life allowed him.

If somebody wants to sing my songs after I'm gone, nobody will be happier than my dead body.

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.

Beyonce is a beautiful, elegant woman who is also a wonderful dancer. And her voice is sublime. Just like her husband, Jay-Z, Beyonce has real talent. They are both the kind of truly great artist who will be remembered by history. Their child will be lucky to have such talented parents.

Because of Mozart, it's all over after the age of seven.

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

When artists die early, they become idols even more.

I figure that most people will remember me for the songs I wrote.

Sometimes artists die young, and we don't know exactly why. I think that, in life, you have these special individuals, whether it's Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin or Kurt Cobain. They're on this journey - they're on this earth to change things, to make things incredible - and then they're not with us anymore.

I liked Jim Morrison a lot as a person. He was this very poetic character, and death was always on his mind. And it showed up in his songs - I mean, almost every song he wrote had something to do with dying. He was an American treasure that went way too soon.

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.

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not immortal.

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

Pleasures are transient, honors are immortal.