Branca Quotes & Sayings

One hundred guitarists making lots of noise would not be something you'd want to listen to. — Glenn Branca

Whatever works for the piece I'm thinking about is the way I write ... — Glenn Branca

Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measuresby results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice. — George Bernard Shaw

Everyone keeps me telling me how great a knee replacement is. Whitey Ford said it was great and so did Ralph Branca. If I had one of those, I don't know that I would retire. But if I left for a month or more, who's going to want me back? — Don Zimmer

It's a mysterious thing that a whole generation of young people can come up and see and understand things that previous generations weren't able to see or understand. — Glenn Branca

It can and will be a more powerful sound but the orchestra has far more potential for expressive power. When I hear a great rock band it can make me feel alive, but when I hear a great orchestra it can make me feel human. — Glenn Branca

Until as women we all say, No! We are not going to starve ourselves, nothing is going to change. We're our own worse enemies sometimes but I still blame men. — Janeane Garofalo

I'm never happy with anything. — Glenn Branca

There were a lot of people doing new and interesting things with rock. But I wanted to take it farther than that. My real influence was punk. I must have listened to the first Patti Smith album 300 times. — Glenn Branca

I really feel instrumental music can speak - can contain tremendous amounts of information - but it's speaking to your subconscious. — Glenn Branca

I liked rock music going back to the '60s, but I never ever had any desire to be a rock musician and when I started doing a band it was experimental music. — Glenn Branca

Brother John and I had our ears glued to the radio. It was a Sunday afternoon in early December 1941, and our football Giants were getting pounded by the Brooklyn Dodgers, an NFL team that played from 1930 to 1943 in Ebbets Field, a faraway ballpark I'd never seen. So far as I was concerned, Brooklyn was on the other side of the moon. The Polo — Ralph Branca

It scares me that people are going to stop writing music. I don't mean music that has to be physically written down, but they'll stop using their brain which is without a doubt the most powerful tool that you could have in any art. — Glenn Branca

I started out in theatre and I definitely have wanted to add extra musical elements to my music with both imagery and text. — Glenn Branca

There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies - a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child. — Vladimir Nabokov

I like to read. I've become obsessed with fiction. And it's too bad: I'm a musician many people love and I myself am not part of the music scene. — Glenn Branca

I'm constantly revising and updating a piece until it's finally recorded. Once it's recorded, then it's over. — Glenn Branca

What is there that money will not do? — Anthony Trollope

If you want to be a legitimate artist, it's more important what you say no to. — Kesha

I could create music that sounded as strange as any electronic music, because you see, my opinion about electronic music is that the real composer is the guy who invented the instrument. Pressing buttons is not composing. Composing is about creating something. — Glenn Branca

You are a fortunate person, indeed, if you can begin each day accepting the fact that during that day there will be ups and downs, good breaks and bad ones, disappointments, surprises, unexpected turns of events — Roy Benjamin

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist. — Jacques-Louis David

Music is about imagination. It's about thought. It's about creating something from nothing. — Glenn Branca

I think of myself of a primitivist. I have never had any of these electronic instruments and I have never had the slightest interest in using them. I use the computer as a tool, simply because it makes composing a lot faster. But I don't go on stage with a computer and make a lot of goofy sounds. — Glenn Branca

I'm just not arbitrarily choosing to have five guitars play one type of thing. In that way there's a definite similarity between a symphony orchestra and the 100 guitar symphony. — Glenn Branca

It's crucial that people are on the right measure at the right time. — Glenn Branca

You know you've reached middle age when your weightlifting consists merely of standing up. — Bob Hope

I want the music to be ambiguous. Its tone gives you a context in which to start visualizing what you're feeling with the music. — Glenn Branca

He was one of a long line of mimsy and embittered middle-class sensitives who disguised their feeble and decadent lust as something spiritual and Socratic.
And why not? If it meant he had to end his days on some Mediterranean island writing lyric prose for Faber and Faber and literary criticism for the New Statesman, running through successions of houseboys and 'secretaries', getting sloshed on Fernet Branca and having to pay off the Chief of Police every six months, then so be it. Better than driving to the office in the rain. — Stephen Fry

For our times are not satisfied with faith and not even with the miracle of changing water into wine - they 'go right on,' changing wine into water. — Soren Kierkegaard

Occasionally I hear a band that blows me away. For instance, there's a musician in Oakland named Weasel Walter who has a band called the Flying Luttenbachers. Go see the Flying Luttenbachers when they're in your town. He's one of the greatest rock composers who ever lived, and he's struggling and living like a poverty-stricken hermit. — Glenn Branca

Sometimes directors may not give you words, you know? They may not talk at all! You've just got to use your radar to figure out how you can get to the center and not lose yourself, but still be directed at the same time. — Faith Prince

The pilgrims on the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. To my knowledge, they didn't wait around for a return trip to Europe. You settle some place with a purpose. If you don't want to do that, stay home. You avoid an awful lot of risks by not venturing outward. — Buzz Aldrin

I didn't want to change the name on the towels. — Lee Trevino

I found the iPad to be too large and heavy to use comfortably in casual situations (like reading in bed, for example), and too limited to use as a replacement for my laptop. By comparison, the Nexus 7 is just the right size for use anywhere - it's very similar in size to my daughter's Kindle Fire, but lighter. — John Battelle