Bruce Hornsby Quotes

You're a constant student, as a musician.

There's no musician who just wakes up one day and decides, 'This is what I want to do.' It takes some development.

I made music a priority every single day.

When I was younger, studying classical music, I really had to put in the time. Three hours a day is not even nice - you have to put in six.

When I started to make music I wasn't as serious at first.

I prefer to think of myself as a musician who is still learning and trying to do something every time out.

It's very important to go through periods where you sound just rotten and you know it, and you have to persevere or give up.

You see, that is it with music, you never stop learning.

Playing music is a lifetime's work. And if you want to carry on with it, you have to try to better yourself. You have to see where the music can take you.

The day I stop learning and I don't try to make myself better on the guitar, that's the day I hang it up and say, 'Goodbye.'

I think it's important for a young musician to stick with a band for a while and really work with a band and stay focused.

Music, to me, was - is - representative of everything I like most in life. It's beautiful and fun, but very rigorous. If you wanted to be good you had to work like crazy. It was a real relationship between effort and reward. My musical life experiences were just as important to me, in terms of forming my development, as my political experiences or my academic life.

Playing guitar is a never-finished journey.

I feel like that I'm learning all the time. I'm learning from new artists, from established artists... every time I listen to '70s rock 'n' roll records, I'm learning. And I think that I'm just now starting to get a hold on what I do.

When Evanescence took time off, I bought a big concert harp and started taking lessons like I was in high school again, which was really, really fun. I felt like I was learning again.

I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.

I had decided that if I was going to be a singer, I had to earn it. I had to learn how to play an instrument.

When I have a chunk of time that I can really dedicate to music, I really want to get into it. I want to do some really hard stuff and push myself.

There was always a piano in the house when I was growing up - my dad played, and I thought it was cool - and when I was eight, I begged my parents to let me have lessons. After a couple of weeks, I wanted to give up, but my parents were very focused and made me keep going, which I'm very pleased about now.

If it takes me 10 years to be the musician I want to be, great.

Most people can do what I do - they can do guitar solos - but they can't do a good, hard rhythm guitar and be dedicated to it.

I've always respected and taken care of my instrument.

I was a late bloomer, but I realised that people really liked it when I played blues scales and, with the piano, I had that insatiable need to prove myself.

Before you start a practicing regimen, you have to be aware that the study of music is a lifelong process-it's a discipline. And the key to mastering any discipline is consistency.

There are people who compose from very young. That is not my case. I went discovering myself.