John Lennon Quotes

The first condition for making music is not to make a noise.

You have certain expressions when you write music, a lot of different emotions, a lot of different feelings.

I really believe in melody.

As a songwriter, simplicity - what not to do, what not to play - can be the hardest thing to achieve.

If you write songs long enough, you run out of material that's original to yourself.

Don't worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

The variations I've composed on the graceful Neapolitan ditty, 'Oh Mamma, Mama Cara,' outshine everything. I can't describe it

There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

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

My music is like a spinning ball. It can turn in one direction, and then it comes back to origins.

Music is not simply an orchestration of something, but it's also not something as trivial as honesty.

And then as we played more and more as a trio, it became more and more of a situation where we realized we really knew how to use the fourth member of the group - that space. The thing about the trio is that it's the biggest sound you can have with the smallest unit.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

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.

Music expresses longing and love and joy better than any piece of dialogue you can ever write.

My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.

I mean, there are only so many notes. What makes something original is how you put it together.

I like to think that my works flow like music. That may be one reason I work in large groups versus one picture of one thing; it's the flow of the whole series that counts.

Because if you've got the wit, you can make anything into a melody, ultimately.

There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that's important.

It's really only all about music. It's not like a big rocket scientist kind of philosophy or anything.

For me, music is in the choice of what not to play as much as in what you've chosen to play.

When words leave off, music begins.