George Gershwin Quotes

I love music, I love all kinds of music, particularly jazz. Jazz is an extension of America. There's no other country in the world that could have produced jazz.

Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.

Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.

I believe that the faith heritage of this country is actually a very important part of America's culture.

There are always generic terms like 'Americana', but there are no boundaries as to where it can go.

Rock n' roll really belongs to all America. It really doesn't belong to one city.

Is it true that we must accept the music of another race as being that which is American? Have not the white Americans sufficient individuality to develop a characteristic style of composition.

The Iraqis have a country that inherited cultures thousands of years old while the Americans have a culture only two hundred years old. Two hundred years will teach thousands of years? Oh Americans, leave Iraq for its people.

From jazz, the blues, country and rock to Hollywood movies, culture has in many ways been our greatest export (or our most obnoxious one, depending on your point of view).

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

But America isn't a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.

That.s what Jazz music is all about.We started the Messengers because somebody had to mind the store for jazz.No America--no Jazz. It is the only culture that America has brought forth.

The people know more about [Jazz] in other countries than in America. America is the last country to know about anything, because we're too fat, we have too much of everything, you understand? And we do not listen.

When I think about country music, I think about America.

I love jazz because it's so American; you know it's our Only Original Art Form. It just goes against the greed of corporate America and the Wall Street Banks that are destroying our economy.

It's not jazz as we know jazz here in America.

The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.

I would rather say that I have to be not from Los Angeles but from America. When I go to Europe or Asia, I find myself disoriented. I'm not so inspired by their culture as much. It's not going to really come out in my work. I would be more influenced by what somebody from America does - like a sign painter from Pennsylvania.

I'm a mix; I'm sure some of my Canadian friends find me very American, both in person and on the page.

I wonder what it means when Americans say I'm an American. In Britain the culture is basically the same from one end of the country to the other. And when I came here and I saw Americans who live, I don't know, in you know, Northwestern California as opposed to Americans who live in Louisiana, as opposed to Americans who live in the Nevada desert. English even is literally a picture that I have in my mind of an oak tree in the field, a single oak in a green field. And also when I think of my Russian roots, it's the landscape that I connect with as more than maybe the poetry or the drama.

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

The western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other is, or can be) the true American one.

India is the most religious country in the world, Sweden is the most secular country in the world, and America is a country of Indians ruled by Swedes.

Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.

And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated by the rest of the world? It is African American jazz and its offshoots. What is my definition of jazz? Safe sex of the highest order.