Rory Gallagher Quotes

Music, at its very best, is dangerous.

Not every song I write is ecstasy. And it can happen only one time. After that, when you sing the same melody and words, it's pleasure, but you don't get wiped out.

When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement.

When you listen to a Yes album, you should listen to the whole thing through headphones with the lights off.

I prefer to make a film that people have a really intense reaction to than have a film that people feel ambivalent about.

I'm not really interested in music. Music is just a means of creating a magical state.

I love music. I think it's a higher art form, in a way, than movies. You know, a film you see once, maybe twice. A song will follow you forever. It's a magical thing.

I wanted to write songs that would play themselves on stage, songs that sweep you through their current.

I like visceral writing that people can't help but respond to, even if they respond, and they're shocked, or they're angry, or they're offended. I think that's the only way to reach people.

Some of the best rock shows I ever saw were those appealing to all your senses.

Music is real. It affects people; it's real.

I just want people to feel the emotion that's in the record. For me it's very raw and beautiful, I guess it's kind of like a diary for me. I'd love for people to be able to listen to it and it make them dance and cry and the same time.

It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.

Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer . . . and on the reader.

This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.

I want real things ... music that makes holes in the sky.

I’ve been feeling something else. Like I’m about to be sucked into something powerful and painful.

Well the first time I performed, my mom was like how she is now when sees me on stage – all red, smiling from ear to ear. So I don’t want to mess up, [be]cause she’s smiling. Seeing my mom happy is kind of like an overwhelming feeling.

You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.

[The music is about ] for the purpose of getting people to an excitement level. They feel something, they feel emotions. They're going to go home after that concert and remember it.Maybe they got something out of the experience rather than intellectualizing about what songs mean which is the whole head trip.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.

Raw love, like raw heartache, could blindside you.

There's a cinematic quality that happens in my mind when I hear something that really lands. An album is just a journal of a life moving through time.

Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause.