Helen Hayes Quotes

When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

Real life is far more complicated than fiction.

If we knew the meaning to everything that is happening to us, then there would be no meaning.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

I started out as a singer and a musician, and I was taught that your job is just to get out of the way of Brahms or Arthur Miller or Shakespeare and convey the brilliance that they created.

You write a song; you know what you want it to sound like. With a band like ours, it's more about the collective. It's important everyone feels expressed and represented.

I look at music like an art form, so it's almost like painting for me, you know?

Music is a living art. You re-create it.

Life is not that simple. That is why it is called life. That word includes both lie and if. Time to figure out which side of the "half" fence you are on: Does your life include a lie or just one big if? There is nothing wrong with either to be honest, but it will make your Sundays longer.

Our life a harp is, with unnumbered strings, And tones and symphonies; but our poor skill Some shallow notes from its great music brings.

I like any and all of my associations with music: writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.

A song to me is a very tangible thing. I can feel it with my hands and see it with my eyes.

Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.

Songs are kind of alive, I think; once you finish writing them, that doesn't mean that that's it for the song. It can have its own little life, I think.

All art is a form of artifice.For in art there can be no prejudices.

Not everything comes together in the best way ever every day. It just doesn't.

If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.

What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.

Art does not imitate, but interpret.

Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.

It's important to be yourself. What art does for everyone, helps you understand yourself and in a distilled way, whether it's a painting or a scene in acting or a joke. It distills something about everyday life that can be important to you.

Man must speak, then sing, then dance. The speaking is the brain, the thinking man. The singing is the emotion. The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries away all.

I have not tried to reproduce nature; I have represented it.

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.