John Ashbery Quotes

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

Music is my only guide. I don't care if people pigeonhole me. Miles Davis is my hero. He covered Cindy Lauper and Michael Jackson, and he didn't give a hoot about what the purists said.

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.

Playing the guitar, you kind of lock into a rhythm and a groove, and then it relaxes me to make up lyrics and sing.

We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.

To me, playing an instrument and singing, all of these different things are just as natural to me as rhyming.

Well, I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing.

Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along.

People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.

Dialogue is like jazz. Dialogue is creative.

I always loved singing. No matter where I was, I would just make up my own stuff.

With me every peep becomes a trumpet solo.

I'm improvising all the time. Everything I do is improvised. On the piano, at least.

Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.

To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.

I think that music, or at least the kind of music that I make, benefits greatly from improvisation.

Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking. . . . the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things - all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.

The wonderful thing about Jazz is its willingness to take chances.

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

All the kids made their own git-tars. Made mine out of a box and bit of stick for a neck. Couldn't do much with it, but that's how you learn.

To me, jazz is a place where anything is possible.

Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

Jazz is my adventure.

Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.