I use music as a medium to talk to people.
Today's symphonic music is sponsored by the upper structures of society.
Music is a language, you see, a universal language.
Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.
I also have a big love of classical music played on piano because this is the environment I grew up in my brother being one of the great masters in this world.
For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence.
I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.
My mother had to explain that one couldn't compose a Liszt rhapsody because it was a piece of music that Liszt himself had composed.
No one had ever told me that whites were supposed to sing one kind of music and blacks another - I sang what I liked in the only voice I had.
It isn't reasonable to expect that everyone in the world is a country music fan. Not yet, anyway.
I think there's enough room in country music for everybody.
What we don't need in country music is divisiveness, public criticism of each other, and some arbitrary judgement of what belongs and what doesn't.
The tastes of country music fans are not limited to the narrow range defined by consultants and programmers and record company moguls.
Until MTV, television had not been a huge influence on music. To compete with MTV, the country music moguls felt they had to appeal to the same young audience and do it the way MTV did.
I'd love to be a saxophonist. I don't know why, but I pretend I'm the saxophonist when I listen to music. I have about as much chance playing the sax as I do learning how to fly.