Louis Armstrong Quotes

I was really inspired by keeping alive these things of my childhood.

My earliest memories have to do with music.

Nothing recalls the past like music.

Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.

Music… is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

Music is the way our memories sing to us across time.

Music is in my DNA!

I grew up in a household that had its roots in church and community and culture and poetry and song and in the arts. Those aspects certainly shaped what I do.

Keep all special thoughts and memories for lifetimes to come. Share these keepsakes with others to inspire hope and build from the past, which can bridge to the future.

I play with feeling so I need to hear what is coming out of the amplifier to inspire me; I don't just play mechanically. I need to hear what I am doing in order to create the next note. If I don't hear it then I can't feed myself.

I loved music from earliest childhood - from as long as I can remember.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

I'm just trying to make my favorite music. That's how I work; I just do things based on the way they feel to me. I want to be touched by the music I'm making. Luckily, other people have shared that response to my work over the years.

Learning how to improvise really awakened my interest in music.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

My most powerful memory was hearing Earl Scruggs on 'The Beverly Hillbillies' as a 5 or 6 year old. That sound just blew me away, shook my head up.

New Orleans, more than many places I know, actually tangibly lives its culture. It's not just a residual of life; it's a part of life. Music is at every major milestone of our life: birth, marriage, death. It's our culture.

I started off playing the clarinet, after I was inspired by listening to my dad's Benny Goodman records.

There was a singer-songwriter who slept on our couch for a year when I was about 7 or 8. She used to sing these songs for us, and I loved it. It was magical to watch her.

I've got a good memory. Sometimes it's a curse. I remember what the light was like in the room the first time I heard Van Morrison's 'Moondance.'

I love cooking. It's one of my favorite things to do. To share my parents' recipes that I grew up with is just something very special to me.

A song can take you to a special time in your life.

I love to listen to the music that first inspired me - I get that fresh feeling back.

I think the best riffs and the best songs come when you're jamming and having a good time.