Musicians and writers. Both horribly talented creatives placed on the planet to make our stay here far more enjoyable. But what does one make of the other? Here we pick out 30 famous authors and their quotes on music. Enjoy.
AND HERE ARE 25 SONGS THAT REFERENCE BOOKS
(Images: Rex)
Friedrich Nietzsche
"Without music, life would be a mistake."
Twilight of the Idols, Or, How to Philosophize With the Hammer
Nick Hornby
"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss."
High Fidelity
Victor Hugo
"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent."
Maya Angelou
"Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances."
William Shakespeare
"If music be the food of love, play on."
Twelfth Night
Chuck Palahniuk
"Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?"
Rant
Plato
"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything."
Kurt Vonnegut
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music."
Aldous Huxley
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
Music at Night and Other Essays
Jack Kerouac
"The only truth is music."
Harper Lee
"Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird."
To Kill A Mockingbird
Gustave Flaubert
"Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."
Madame Bovary
Stephen King
“You couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar.”
The Stand
Hunter S. Thompson
"Turn the goddam music up! My heart feels like an alligator!"
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Henry David Thoreau
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away."
Charles Bukowski
"Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener jaded and spent."
Oscar Wilde
"Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory."
Dan Brown
"Telling someone about what a symbol means is like telling someone how music should make them feel."
The Da Vinci Code
J.M. Barrie
"If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing."
T.S. Eliot
"There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music."
George Eliot
"It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted."
Middlemarch
Jane Austen
"Without music, life would be a blank to me."
Emma
Tennessee Williams
"In memory, everything seems to happen to music."
The Glass Menagerie
Mark Twain
"A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn't."
Leo Tolstoy
"Music is the shorthand of emotion"
Kahlil Gibran
"Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife."
Truman Capote
"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make."
Truman Capote: Conversations
Haruki Murakami
"Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering."
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Arthur Conan Doyle
"Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood."
A Study in Scarlet
George Bernard Shaw
"Hell is full of musical amateurs."
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