Judy Holliday Quotes

I think to be a good songwriter, you have to be able to play an instrument.

A great song can make a terrible singer sound good, but a good singer - you put a great song on top of that, you're really in great shape!

The conductor's gift does not always go hand in hand with that of composition; indeed, the union is found much more seldom than is popularly believed.

Composers are not all good conductors.

I never thought of myself as being a good songwriter. There are a ton of other people that are good songwriters, but I don't think I'm in the club. What I do well is perform, sometimes sing pretty good, and accompany myself well and arrange fairly well.

Great musicians are great musicians, whether they're playing a trombone or an electric guitar or a xylophone.

I don't think a good singer or a great singer is either of those things without a great song.

I've been writing and composing songs since I was 5 years old.

I started playing guitar before I can really remember, and I started writing really early, too.

Whoever hired me might've just heard 'Refugee.' Well, I'm not the secret to 'Refugee.' The secret to 'Refugee' is the song. But if somebody really good calls me up to play on something because they like the way I played on 'Refugee,' then I wind up playing on another really good song.

I don't see how they can with most of my pieces, but I think it's unfortunate that they can through familiarity with flashy performances of a great deal of other music.

I'm kind of the town pump. I think I have a pretty good ear for what sounds good in this style.

I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

I regard myself as a beautiful musical instrument, and my role is to contribute that instrument to scripts worthy of it.

A good interpreter can take a piece of bad music and make it sound pretty decent, while a bad interpreter can take good music and make it sound cheap. I can tell that some people have a bad taste, and unlike on the piano, they smear around a lot, that is bad taste.

I will work with a director who has good material because at the end of the day, that's what counts.

When I got my band in 1983, I knew what I had to do. If I'm going to have a big band, they're going to have to sound equally as good as what I'm used to hearing.

I can play piano, and I write everything on piano, but I don't really feel like a piano player, necessarily.

I've always said that music is like literature.

I am the pianist of the duo, although Aleksey does pretty good... you know we've written more and more stuff where he has to play the piano. But you know, to be very honest, I actually went into music because I wanted to be a composer and a conductor. And piano was just one of the ways to get into that.

Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.

I am an interpreter of music rather than a composer of it.

Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.

As long as I can sing halfway decent, I'd rather sing than act. There's nothing like being in good voice, feeling good, having good numbers to do and having a fine orchestra.

I'm a composer, and therefore I know when I've written a good tune. When you've written a good song is when you know that the lyric is completely coalesced with the song.