Music Literature Quotes

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.

I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting.

Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.

I wish - I wish instead of just recommending these books, I could set them down at your doorstep. The collected stories of John Updike, the second volume of T.C. Boyle's collected stories, and Stanley Crouch's book about the rise and times of our genius saxophone player Charlie Parker. These are deep books, books that you can get lost in.

Conducting! A subject, truly, concerning which much might be written, yet scarcely anything of real importance is to be found in books.

Sometime during the 1990s, when I was teaching philosophy at UCSD, my friend, colleague, and music teacher, Carol Plantamura, discussed the possibility of teaching a course together looking at ways in which various literary works (plays, stories, novels) had been treated as operas, and how different themes emerged in the opera and in its original. One of the pairings we planned to use was Mann's great novella and Britten's opera. Unfortunately, the course was never taught, but the idea remained with me.

I love story songs because I've always loved books.

I kind of like the idea of creating my own literature within my albums. I definitely thought about that when I started writing songs.

The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer.

I collect and read as many books about music and film as I do fiction.

...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

I always wrote like rock 'n' roll. And I always listen to rock 'n' roll as poetry.

Great song lyrics are as valid a part of American literature as any novel.

With Dick Smith there, and the words of Peter Shaffer... they've got to be the most beautiful descriptions in music ever written on film or in literature. And we could hear the music accompanying the words... What more can you ask for?

Culture - art, music, literature - is the long game, because it's the way to change people's ideas in a more personal way.

In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap - the literary world and the world of rock music.

I only read the very best music books. Donald Fagan's memoir 'Eminent Hipsters' is great. Bob Dylan's memoir 'Chronicles' and Patty Smith's 'Just Kids' are both incredible.

Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.

Never Mind Nirvana is the first novel I’ve read that makes music as important as food, clothing romance — a fresh twist millions will be able to identify with – and the music of Lindquist’s language is a perfect match for the subject. I think he’s the writer to watch in the new millennium.

Dylan's 'Chronicles' is easily the best rock n' roll memoir ever written, as far as I'm concerned. There aren't many stories in there, but if you want to know where an artist came from and why he thinks the way he does, then that's the one.

Self-portraits have been done in painting, but never in music or literature. It has no meaning, it makes no sense. And in movies I was wondering if it could. And how.