Artie Shaw Quotes

I think that there are quite a few acts which have stayed with the basic feelings and that's good. And I see something of a swing back to that. For example there are quite a few people copying my early stuff now. Like it's become a reference point or something.

I just think swing is a matter of some good things put together that you can really pat your foot by. I can't define it beyond that.

Jazz was my first love.

So I like that sound, but I am not interested in being retro.

The problem with technology, as with fashion, is that it's impossible to be 'in' forever.

I'm bringing the 2000s back.

I was really into ska.

They said Bird played bebop, but Bird could still swing. I've heard a lot of guys play bebop, but they wasn't swinging.

Trends don't mean very much to me. They come, they go, they turn around.

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

I think, with suits and clothes, if you keep them long enough, they all come back in fashion. It's like me. I've been around long enough and I've come back in fashion.

It's about moments in life that are great but don't last. They don't go on, but you always have the memory and they have an effect on you. That's what I was thinking about.

It’s weird to think the place where we’re standing will only be a point in the sky.

I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend... I can pretend that things last.

It was hard to remember what the yard had looked like even twelve hours before, undisturbed and pristine. Like it takes so little to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.

Fidelity is for phonographs

That's the music that I play at home all the time, Joni Mitchell. Court and Spark I love because I'd always hoped that she'd work with a band. But the main thing with Joni is that she's able to look at something that's happened to her, draw back and crystallize the whole situation, then write about it. She brings tears to my eyes, what more can I say? It's bloody eerie. I can relate so much to what she says. "Now old friends are acting strange/They shake their heads/They say I've changed."

The things that we have and that we think are so solid - they're like smoke, and time is like the sky that the smoke disappears into, nothing is left but the sky, and the sky keeps on being just the same forever.

You don't really think about [career] much, because in a way it seems like another time and a different person.

The '70's came and went already

The future is but the obsolete in reverse.

What Flaubert refers to as the “mélancholies du voyage” is like the sadness I feel as one season departs and another arrives.

It was only the matter of a new voice. Nobody listened to an old voice anymore. Old voices became a part of one's self, like a fingernail.

To me, nostalgia is nothing more than a mindless plundering of the past for the commonplace.