Gibb Quotes & Sayings

The gift of phrase was instantaneous to him in him, and that must partly account for his huge output; but there was a plentitude of mind as well as a swiftness of phrase to help him; he never put a nib wrong. — Jocelyn Gibb

He was the average guy. Maurice, I think, reflected every man. — Barry Gibb

His tastes were essentially for what had magnitude and a suggestion of myth: the heroic and the romantic never failed to excite his imagination — Jocelyn Gibb

Our parents came home one day and heard us, and they thought it was the radio, but our grandfather told them it was us. — Barry Gibb

My music, certainly, has never embarrassed me. — Barry Gibb

You know, we'd just had a birthday, he was ... you know, he still had a future out of him, and all I can is he was just one of the most beautiful people in the world ... a very gifted man, and it's a loss to the world, not just for us. — Robin Gibb

Girls are always running through my mind. They don't dare walk. — Andy Gibb

The most important thing about recovery is to pass the message on. — Maurice Gibb

It's very hard to write a song alone. It's only by jamming that you can get a song together. — Maurice Gibb

I've worked with a lot of people who are more famous than myself who are terribly insecure. — Barry Gibb

When Maurice touched a keyboard, it was like something from a movie, magical. He would always give you something from a movie, and you'd go, what did you just play ... immediately inspirational writings, amazing. That's what we're going to miss. — Robin Gibb

In 1973 we moved to the British Isle of Man, and I put my first band together for one year, named Melody Fair. — Andy Gibb

I'll be honest. We copied everyone ... the Beatles, the Bachelors. It was the only way people would even listen to you. — Maurice Gibb

But even now, when people see me in the street, they point upwards to the sky. — Barry Gibb

I like blues but it is music I am too ignorant to understand. — Barry Gibb

We said we'd fly the flag without him and carry on. I didn't give him a kiss because I still hadn't accepted what was happening. I was hoping that some miracle was going to happen. Of course, it didn't. I wish I had kissed him now. — Robin Gibb

I'd never try to be that distinctive from the Bee Gees' sound. I'm very proud of being a Bee Gee and am always aware that I'll be identified as a Bee Gee. — Robin Gibb

If some people can imagine that a person they love is alive in another world, why can't I imagine Maurice is alive in this one An artist is a person who uses art to run away from reality. It's not wrong-it's survival. There's nothing wrong with me creating a world in which Maurice is alive. — Robin Gibb

This is not the true meaning of jihad," he spoke into the starless dark. "Jihad is the holy war we have within ourselves. That is the meaning below the surface. Our internal struggle for purity," he said with emphasis, pressing his forefinger into his chest. "It is the war of ascendance over our basal instincts. It has absolutely nothing to do with others. The only thing we can have control over is ourselves. — Camilla Gibb

If the requirements of world-structure are so inexorable, what scope is there for a free providence in distributing pleasures and pains? If pains are the natural rubs of a world-structure bearing on sentient creatures, what need have we to view them as instruments of a disciplinary providence? — Jocelyn Gibb

I'm not a party person or someone who likes to sit and drink in clubs all night, and never really have been. I have a good time through work. — Robin Gibb

What I think is true is that at a certain stage in his life, he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except for a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals...Self-knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own weakness and shortcomings and nothing more. Anything beyond that he sharply suspected, both in himself and in others, as a symptom of spiritual megalomania. At best, there was so much else, in letters and in life, that he found much more interesting than himself. — Jocelyn Gibb

I don't like rock opera with back beats. — Robin Gibb

I don't ever wish I was somebody else. — Barry Gibb

FOr a while, I'd never had the opportunity to prove on TV that I could play the piano. — Maurice Gibb

Before, I was terrified on stage. I only play guitar during the acoustic songs. After a while, you can elicit certain responses from the crowd, like Elvis. — Andy Gibb

I was always the one left behind. Out in the streets, when they saw me they'd say, That's just one of the Bee Gees. — Maurice Gibb

It is not the money but the self-respect and wanting to create good music. — Barry Gibb

we would stride over Hinksey and Cumnor - we walked almost as fast as we talked - disputing and quoting, as we looked for the dark dingles and tree-topped hills of Matthew Arnold. This kind of walk must be among the commonest, perhaps among the best, of undergraduate experiences. Lewis, with the gusto of a Chesterton or a Belloc, would suddenly roar out a passage of poetry that he had newly discovered and memorized, particularly if it were in Old English, a language novel and enchanting to us both for its heroic attitudes and crashing rhythms — Jocelyn Gibb

He was never quite at home in what we may call our post-positivist era — Jocelyn Gibb

I'm quite proud of my piano playing. Robin's never played a note on the piano at our recording sessions. I just wish I could be appreciated musically now. — Maurice Gibb

I prefer my first word, 'formidable.' But this was softened by joviality in youth and kindliness in maturity. Genius is formidable and so is goodness; he had both. It is useful in a picture sometimes to introduce a balancing figure to give scale, and I would choose the figure of W. H. Auden as one of comparable impressiveness and goodness, felt as formidable and friendly. — Jocelyn Gibb

We worked for 11 years to get where we are today, and I want to take our work seriously so that later on I'll be able to appreciate the money we've made. — Maurice Gibb

I have a huge ego and a huge inferiority complex at the same time. — Barry Gibb

His sentences are in homely English, and yet there is something Roman in the easy handling of clauses, and something Greek in their ascent from analogy to idea. — Jocelyn Gibb

In the beginning, Barry and I couldn't decide if we were going got go forward with the name of the Bee Gees or just as Barry and Robin. Now we've decided to continue as the Bee Gees because we feel we can, and Maurice would have wanted it. — Robin Gibb

If only I could rest for a time in quiet pain and awaken new and willing. He is looking forward and I am inward. — Camilla Gibb

The team exists to accomplish a result. The community exists to support its members while they fulfill their purpose ... When partnerships, management teams, and organizations build communities, they tap into a greater and deeper reservoir of courage, wisdom, and productivity. — Peter Gibb

The marks of this style are weight and clarity of argument, sudden turns of generalization and genial paradox, the telling short sentence to sum a complex paragraph, and unexpected touches of personal approach to the reader, whom he always assumes to be as logical, as learned, as romantic, and as open to conviction as himself. Not that in fact he was easily open to conviction; perhaps 'open to argument' would be a truer description. — Jocelyn Gibb

I don't have too much faith in destiny, or an afterlife. This is it. — Robin Gibb

As he claimed the right to enjoy the literature of any period for the joy that was in it, so he claimed the liberty to profit from the insights of every generation open to his study. He would have been ashamed to know nothing of what was being said, written or done in his own day; but he felt under no obligation to find it better than the products of previous time, and especially than those which had passed the sieve of old oblivion. — Jocelyn Gibb

I hadn't accepted he was seriously ill. The idea that someone so close to you couldn't wake up was utterly incomprehensible. Then the doctor came in ... Maurice had no brain left. There wasn't any activity at all. — Robin Gibb

I like the idea of a dream being hoarded for future generations. — Bill Gibb

My whole life has been a bit like a Nintendo game. — Robin Gibb

His conversion to Christianity seems to have come about largely by thinking...It did not come by sudden intuition, or overwhelming vision, or even by the more usual path of conviction of sin calling for repentance and atonement. — Jocelyn Gibb

You can be tops in Australia and be unheard of everywhere else. — Barry Gibb

My idea of a good time is creating something and reading a good book. — Robin Gibb

So many groups fail because they spend all their time in the clubs. Work pours in and they can't handle it because of late-night drinking. — Maurice Gibb

I think we have to act like stars because it is expected of us. So we drive our big cars and live in our smart houses. — Maurice Gibb

There was...the discrepancy between what one expected of the accomplished medieval scholar (and, later, the penetrating exponent of theological and spiritual matters) and the robust, no-nonsense, unmistakably strident man, clumsy in movement and in dress, apparently little sensitive to the feelings of others, determined to cut his way to the heart of any matter with shouts of distinguo! before re-shaping it entirely. One quickly felt that for him dialectic supplied the place of conversation. Any general remarks were of an obvious and even platitudinous kind; talk was dead timber until the spark of argument flashed. Then in a trice you were whisked from particular to fundamental principles; thence (if you wanted) to eternal verities; and Lewis was alert for any riposte you could muster. It was comic as well as breathtaking; and Lewis would see the comedy as readily as the next man. — Jocelyn Gibb

Here at last was an Attendant Spirit to liberate us from the spells of Burkhardt or Addington Symonds and challenge the easy antithesis of fantastic and fideistic Middle Ages versus logical and free-thinking Renaissance. And it is a prime justification of medieval studies that if properly pursued they soon dispose of such facile distinctions, and overthrow the barriers of narrow specialism and textbook chronology. In this sense medieval just as much as classical studies make men more humane. It would indeed be hard to separate in Lewis' culture the one from the other: just as hard as it is to understand the Middle Ages themselves without knowing classical literature or the Renaissance without knowing the Middle Ages. This continuity of literature and of learning Lewis not only asserted but embodied. — Jocelyn Gibb

No one knew me until I met my wife Lulu. Lulu's mother used to ask, Which one is Maurice? For six months she thought Lulu was dating Barry. — Maurice Gibb

I'm Mr Boring, not a party-goer at all. — Barry Gibb

I've never been into parties, premieres or night-clubbing. — Barry Gibb

Now there is a new group every week; it seems like everybody and anybody can get into the charts. — Barry Gibb

Finally, I found a program that's put my troubles behind me. — Maurice Gibb

I'm the eldest at 51, and if the Stones can drag themselves around once more, then there's a few more albums in us. — Barry Gibb

No one knew better than he how an understanding of poetry depends on an understanding of the poet's universe. — Jocelyn Gibb

By going solo I could lose a fortune but money is not important. — Barry Gibb

I'm not a big blues fan, but I don't know anyone who doesn't dig B.B. King. — Maurice Gibb

Man, to Lewis, is an immortal subject; pains are his moral remedies, salutary disciplines, willing sacrifices, playing their part in a drama of interchange between God and him. — Jocelyn Gibb

I grew up in a show business family, so we've always had a great sense of balance, being so close to my parents. I've always known what is and isn't reality. — Andy Gibb

I've been working at performing for five years now. I've been working in Australia and Spain and England. When I was only 15 or 16, 1 was performing in bars; I could have had legal problems, but it's also the only way to get to know what music is all about. — Andy Gibb

My work means everything to me. — Robin Gibb

The only thing that exists to me is commercial pop music. — Barry Gibb

There is nothing to compare with the instantaneous feedback a singer gets from the people sitting in front of him. That is where it all comes together - all the rehearsing and working to get everything just exactly right. — Andy Gibb

I'm very much a family person. — Barry Gibb

We will pursue every factor, every element, every second of the timeline, of the final hours of Maurice's life. We will pursue that relentlessly. That will be our quest from now on. — Robin Gibb

We had to leave Australia to become international stars. — Barry Gibb

What a pity it is that by such superfluous unrealities he should furnish the public with excuses to evade the overwhelming realism of his moral theology! — Jocelyn Gibb

in describing the various writers of his idolatry he more than once lets fall a phrase that could equally apply to himself. 'To read Spenser,' he says, 'is to grow in mental health.' What he values in Addison is his 'open-mindedness.' The moments of despair chronicled in Scott's diary cannot, he claims, counterpoise 'that ease and good temper, that fine masculine cheerfulness' suffused through the best of the Waverly novels. Most of all it was the chiaroscuro of what Chaucer called 'earnest' and 'game' that attracted him. He found it eminently in the poetry of Dunbar, that late-medieval Scottish maker who wrote the greatest religious poetry and the earthiest satire in the language — Jocelyn Gibb

The Bee Gees were always heavily influenced by black music. As a songwriter, it's never been difficult to pick up on the changing styles of music out there, and soul has always been my favourite genre. — Robin Gibb

Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made. — Camilla Gibb

Victoria was just as much in love with me as I was with her. We could not bear to be apart for a single second. We were like two lovers shipwrecked on a desert island. There was no world outside our love. — Andy Gibb

With Maurice suddenly going, I realised ... I think I've matured. I don't take things lightly any more. — Robin Gibb

I'll have to get people to write songs for me right now until my own writing comes around. — Andy Gibb

Why do I need TV when I have forty-eight apartment windows to watch across the vacant lot, and a sliver of Lake Erie? I've seen history out this window. So much. I was four when we moved here in 1919. The fruit-sellers' carts and coal wagons were pulled down the street by horses back then. I used to stand just here and watch the coal brought up by the handsome lad from Groza, the village my parents were born in. Gibb Street was mainly Rumanians back then. It was "Adio" - "Good-bye"- in all the shops when you left. Then the Rumanians started leaving. They weren't the first, or the last. This has always been a working-class neighborhood. It's like a cheap hotel - you stay until you've got enough money to leave. — Paul Fleischman

When Andy died, I just drank to dumb my mind. — Maurice Gibb

I sense in his style an indefeasible core of Protestant certainties, the certainties of a simple, unchanging, entrenched ethic that knows how to distinguish, unarguably, between Right and Wrong, Natural and Unnatural, High and Low, Black and White, with a committed force, an ethic on which his ramified and seemingly conciliatory structures of argument are invisibly based — Jocelyn Gibb

Like Johnson, Lewis was more impressive in his conversation than in his poetry, and more impressive in his prose - particularly in his learned prose - than in his conversation. — Jocelyn Gibb

It's hard for me to put on weight. — Robin Gibb

I just love the feeling a close family gives you and I wouldn't change it for anything. — Barry Gibb

It is one thing to understand the doctrine, and quite another to be masters of the controversy.' Lewis's ambition was of course to know the doctrine and to be master of the controversy. — Jocelyn Gibb

I love stuff like Mozart. — Robin Gibb

Lots of people aren't comfortable with silences. They feel they've got to fill the dead air. — Robin Gibb

Everybody who knows us knows we always have a good time. — Maurice Gibb

It just felt like the right time to focus on solo material. — Robin Gibb

Jim Morrison's very good looking, but I don't like this version of the song. The Feliciano version is better. — Maurice Gibb

I don't like lifts and will walk up 20 flights of stairs if I have to. Crowded rooms make me uncomfortable, too, although I can sing to a stadium full of thousands of people no bother. — Robin Gibb

Tiny Tim? Anyone could sing like that. It's atrocious. It's hideous, really. — Maurice Gibb

I sometimes wonder if the tragedies my family has suffered are a kind of karmic price for all the fame and fortune the Bee Gees have had. — Robin Gibb

I bet Maurice Gibb's heart monitor was singing the tune of Stayin' Alive. — Graham Norton

[Lewis had a] determined impersonality towards all except his very close friends. — Jocelyn Gibb

I have a little dictaphone and if a sound takes my fancy or if a lyric comes to me in the middle of the night I'll just record it there and then. — Barry Gibb

It makes us feel better that everyone out there is thinking of Maurice. — Robin Gibb

I don't take things for granted, because everything feels more fragile. It's made me wonder about mortality and how long you've got somebody in the world. I'm more fearful than I used to be. — Robin Gibb

I write the music because I can't really write lyrics. But I can write chords like Robin's never heard of. So I provide the music for them to add the lyrics to. — Maurice Gibb

I wanted to show that women could run, but I also wanted to kind of inspire the idea that ordinary people can run. I was like, boy, I feel so good when I run, if everybody could feel like this, this sense of joy and physical well-being and strength and autonomy you have when you run, how much better the world would be, you know? — Bobbi Gibb

I don't know what 'home' or 'abroad' is any more. — Robin Gibb

But all bubbles have a way of bursting or being deflated in the end. — Barry Gibb