Terry Teachout Quotes

I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I've loved writing my whole life. When I put them together, it was probably in my early 20s where I put words to music for the first time.

I think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn't make no difference what color they were.

I didn't know I'd ever write a Broadway musical.

I am a singer; my job is to create music and harmony. Wherever I see harmony, I would go towards there.

The thing that makes me want to proceed and finish a song is when it really touches me and makes me feel something.

A musical is really one of the most complicated beasts. It's a play, and there's music... and there's dancing... it's unbelievably satisfying to get something up out of your brain onto a piece of paper ... and start the process and then see it on the stage.

When you write really good lyrics - and sometimes I did! - they are just a joy to sing.

What is so beautiful about a composer and a lyricist is that their job is to push a story along and not halt it.

Music is so important to me that that's got to be the only way I can do it. In the purest possible way.

I'm so happy I discovered early how wonderful music makes me feel.

Musical theater has sort of always been there for me, but I haven't always treated it with the same reverence as it's treated me.

Once I tried to find myself as a musician and a composer, I went back and saw that there was something special about Puerto Rican music. I knew that before, but had never sat down and thought about it. The more I learned about it, the more it found its way into the music I was writing.

I sure love to write songs, but I'm not so sure of my voice.

Why do people compose music? Why do people listen to music? When we go into a concert, we go into a place where we want to experience a sort of ecstasy, to come out of ourselves.

I've fallen in love with the classical world of imagery, and what I'd like to do now over the last bit of my life is to photograph some nudes.

The performance of Carnatic music is multi-dimensional and layered. A performance is at once an artiste's cathartic process of personal exploration and an open energy exchange with the audience: a release and a conversation.

I think the main focus as a musician should be to play the music you love to play, and the rest is going to come naturally.

When I was about 11 years old, I wrote a song with my dad. Then in high school I started more writing.

A music serves truth up to you in a really interesting way that allows you to luxuriate in its beauty and, at the same time, to hopefully see yourself in its fragility.

Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet loves poetry and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a person who responds to figures and landscapes. He is primarily one who loves pictures.

You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty.

I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

I'm just wowed by the universe. I'm just glad to do something I love to do. I love color, I love painting, I love shapes, I love composition, I love the people around me. I'm adoring it all. My legacy is in the hands of other people.

I have no artistic sensibilities. I wish I did. It is probably really cool. I have work habits and work ethic. For me, all the things I do are jobs.

I tried to write a TV series, and then I discovered first of all that I love writing more than anything on this earth, and that you could write exactly as well as you want to.