Jeff Ament Quotes

Almost 15 with music, we have so many guitars that we developed over the years. The latest one is 'The Majesty' guitar, which I'm really proud of.

All the embroidery is made in my father's workshop in India... and all the cutting and sewing is done in my studio.

Our dresses take a long time to make.

Walking is a skill that took millions of years for us to develop... If you wanted to design a robot that could walk as well as a person, this would be fantastically complicated software. It would have to be doing billions of calculations with every step.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

If I were a 13-year-old and I wanted to create subversive art, I wouldn't go out and buy an electric guitar. I'd get myself a personal computer.

Gracie: You have an unusual house. Have you lived here long? Bobby Tom: A couple of years. I don't much like it myself, but the architect is real proud of it. She calls it urban Stone Age with a Japanese Tahitian influence. I sort of just call it ugly.

I was really into music. I started playing guitar also when I was nine. I wanted to be in the Beatles, even though John Lennon died the year I got a guitar and the Beatles broke up before I was born.

My guitar style was developed during that 10-year period. That's me. That's the way I play, and I don't wish to play any other way. Our own individual identities are firmly stamped on this album.

I started on drums when I was 13 and played them for two years. Then I went to guitar for a year, played keyboards for a year and a half, and went back to guitar.

I don't know what happens in the next years. But I cannot now design a policy in which we try to keep China from developing, because in some years, if they develop, they might be rich enough to challenge us, and adopt the principle that we will hold down any state that might in the future become strong. That would make us a world empire for which we wouldn't have the talents or the convictions.

Many years ago, we were only able to build boxes. Today, architects from all over the world are working with us - Zaha Hadid from London, Gerkan, Marg and Partner from Hamburg, Kengo Kuma from Japan. We brought design and digitalization from abroad to China.

About ten years ago, I knew three chords on the guitar. Now, in 1982, I know three chords on the guitar.

The same architect who designed the Seattle fair's futuristic Science Center, with its lacy Gothic arches and spires, Minoru Yamasaki, was hired to design the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Seattle had promised fairgoers a glimpse of the world that would exist in 2001. That year eventually unfolded as something less than the dream we'd imagined.

I'm playing a D-28 Martin that I've had about 20 years or so. I've got a '51 Martin and I thought I shouldn't be taking this on the road. So I went down to Gruhn Guitars in Nashville and kind of traded around and ended up with this one. This guitar sounded pretty good as new guitar.

51 Martin [guitar] sounded pretty good as new guitar. Martin has several levels of guitars now, and this one is pretty good.

A chef is a chef, a cook is a cook; a lorry driver is a lorry driver and a designer is a designer. I've never heard anyone say that Philippe Starck is a chef. The important thing is dialogue. If I said to Norman Foster that he was a chef he'd say "No", but he might have a dialogue with chefs. People have said to me for many years that I'm not a chef and that I'm an artist instead, but I always say, "No, I'm a chef." I just have dialogues with designers.

I wasn’t thriving socially, so I stayed in my room and played guitar all the time, at the time, I thought I was inventing a new sound that would change the whole outlook of music. I’ve discovered in the last few years that it was just the Seattle Sub Pop sound.

Design job fell on me. I didn't want to do it. It was an accident. For the first 10 years I said, "Tomorrow I'm stopping."

When these guitar mags bring up that stuff up and say such and such came up with this and that which is pushing the boundaries, I just say, "let's step back for a minute and admit something: nothing has happened for the last 100 years." And it's okay. It's not a bad thing ... We're all working with "tools" that have been in existence for the last 100 years and there hadn't been a new "tool" for a long long time.

When we make those guitars we make tons of prototypes, I have all those. And once a guitar has come out there's all different versions and colours and woods and I have all those. There's hundreds of them.

I did [picking cotton] from - until I was 18 years old, that is. Then I picked the guitar, and I've been picking it since.

This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.

The only thing I ever really wanted was a Strat .. I started playing guitar after seeing Jimi Hendrix on TV the day he died...then I got Deep Purples' Fireball album which was also a big influence .. I have a collection of more than 200 of them that includes Strats from every year since March 1954 - the first month the Strat was made

You've got this piece of wood and some wires, pickups and some strings. How somebody uses that configuration to make something memorable, that's what's interesting to me.