David Amram Quotes

There are lots of things I like about playing in a band, the things I can't do by myself you know.

Every song has a bouquet, which is the music. If you can put words with something that is really apt, then you've done it.

Music - opera particularly - is a process which is endurable or successful only if it is achieved by people who love to collaborate.

A fantastic actor in a scene that's just closed off will be good. But when working with a director who knows little tricks - correct music, slowly pushing in - that stunning performance will somehow become even better. I've always seen it as a symbiotic relationship.

Everyone who makes music is a good collaborator at their foundation because in order to make music, you have to connect to it in a way that other people can't.

I've always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.

To make a song is a gift, and once it's done it keeps evolving and changing and becomes a tool to interact with other people. It's like a conversation.

Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with. The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.

I love telling a story through song. It helps me take it to a deeper place.

Paul Gray - he believed in my art, and I believed in his music. Together, we decided to change the world, and that's what we did.

We love to work together. Especially when he stands behind me at the microphone and we hug.

From the very beginning, we just sort of made things up together. That's one of the great things about having a twin brother; you have a sort of feedback loop, where you can bounce things off of each other.

My friend Akshay Upadhyay and I used to write poetry and read out to each other.

You can't do seven successful albums and just hate each other. Our yin and yang, and night and day, is what made us great when we went into the studio.

Poets are not meant to be in competition.

In music, as you develop a theme or musical idea, there are many points at which directions must be decided, and at any time I was in the throes of debate with myself, harmonically or melodically, I would turn to Billy Strayhorn. We would talk, and then the whole world would come into focus. The steady hand of his good judgment pointed to the clear way that was fitting for us. He was not, as he was often referred to by many, my alter ego. Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.

Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!

You are my courage, as I am your conscience," he whispered. "You are my heart---and I your compassion. We are neither of us whole, alone. Do ye not know that, Sassenach?

Sometimes you're working in highly emotional scenes and you'll get lost in the moment. You're having fun with your friend at work. It's an opportunity to give to them as much as they've given back to you.

I love music. For me, music is morning coffee. It's mood medicine. It's pure magic. A good song is like a good meal-I just want to inhale it and then share a bite with someone else.

And whether or not we had now paid our dues, he was my blessing, and I was his.

Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.

Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand.

the process of a book's coming to life is not fully complete until your imagination meets mine on the page. The words evoke pictures and something altogether new is created, something different from the limits of my own skills and imagination. Something that is a marriage between your heart, mind, and body - and mine.

I wrote poems and an essay about that weird language. We still remember it to a certain extent, and it still comes up when we're all together. It's so fundamental to how I think.