Music For Kids Quotes & Sayings

You have an entire generation of kids who grew up with the idea that music is something that you can download for free. — G-Eazy

My father had played cornet, although I never saw him play it. I found his mouthpiece when I was a kid. I used to buzz it. And my mother played piano and sang in the church choir for different functions. So there was always music in the house, jazz, gospel, or whatever. Especially jazz records. — Johnny Griffin

I got caught up on drugs for a few years, I'm off it, I'm very happy, got two kids and a family and everything. And like I said I'm making the underground music, and keeping it real. — Vanilla Ice

There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages. — Tom Morello

Fact is that I played piano and performed, as a young kid, a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra . Don't forget I was only eleven-years-old and to be on the stage at that age had tremendous impact on me. Basically love for classical music and performing as a kid on the big stage probably led toward this decision, which meant that music is going to be my big love but also my profession. — Herbie Hancock

Young people can listen to music at any moment in the day or night. Which is great, but I think it kind of devalues it as well. They don't feel the need to own it. They certainly don't feel the need to pay for it. I'd have to save up for weeks to buy an album when I was a kid, and that made it even more great for me when I finally got that thing in my hand. — Paul Weller

There are kids out there that are into Iron Maiden and others who are strictly into industrial music, but they come for the same reason; they all like us and they different things out of the band's music. — Daisy Berkowitz

It's just weird that for some people, art is a luxury. My parents had no artistic outlet. Some people pass down music to their kids, but I couldn't tell you what my mom's or dad's favorite song is. So when I started going out into the world, I was drawn to people who knew about movies, art, even fashion. — Channing Tatum

I don't even listen to the records after they come out. It's outlawed in my house. My wife and my kids can't play any of my music around me. Once it comes out, for me, it's just business. Numbers. — Dr. Dre

It's a shame, but also for kids it's so easy now for them to download it to their phone and listen to it everywhere. If you go to Lille Eurostar station there is music playing: Why? What's the point? It's like showing someone a movie on a small crappy screen. It should be sounding good! There's a lot of noise pollution, in that sense. — Stephen Dewaele

What liberals must conserve is the middle class: the stable family who can afford to enjoy music and theater and take the kids to Europe someday and put money in the collection plate and save for college and keep up the home and be secure against catastrophe. This family has taken big hits in payroll taxes and loss of buying power and a certain suppressed panic about job security. — Garrison Keillor

My mom said, "What I want is a happy kid, not a rich kid. That's what I root for." She saw how much joy I got from playing music, and those years were leaner than lean! — Vince Gill

Surfing and music were incredible outlets for me when I was a kid. And there are some really tricky times when you're growing up and it's easy to make a wrong decision, even with a good family and community around you. Surfing and music kept me out of trouble. — Jon Foreman

One of my pleasantest memories as a kid growing up in New Orleans was how a bunch of us kids, playing, would suddenly hear sounds. It was like a phenomenon, like the Aurora Borealis
maybe. The sounds of men playing would be so clear, but we wouldn't be sure where they were coming from. So we'd start trotting, start running
'It's this way! It's this way!'
And sometimes, after running for a while, you'd find you'd be nowhere near that music. But that music could come on you any time like that. The city was full of the sounds of music. — Danny Barker

I am a true 80s girl. I loved Kylie, Madonna, The Bangles and Human League. I fancied a couple of the Neighbours kids too and I loved Bros. God, I had terrible music taste. I'm getting a taste of my own medicine now, as my daughter's been asking for some quite scary albums. — Donna Air

I used to enjoy all the white bands when I was a kid listening to the radio. But the record companies, they take music and label it - like, they say "rock". Because the white singers can't sound like James Brown, they call him "soul". They've been doing that for years. That's the prejudice crap. — Miles Davis

I've been making music for as long as I can remember. I would, as a kid, just sing little ideas or be making something. — St. Lucia

Basically, as a kid I grew up to a lot of good music, and part of my appreciation for music, from being a small child, was appreciating Jamaican music. — Adrian Young

It's an honor for me to close out Mysteryland. In American music history this is hallowed ground. I think electronic music has a lot in common with the spirit of rock and roll and what Woodstock had going on at the time. We are kind of the new kids on the block and this music isn't accepted by everyone so we are still kind of getting into pop culture and I think its appropriate that this festival is here and kicking down the door. — Kaskade

All over the world kids and women [are] getting killed right now over beliefs, this is silly to get angry over. If it bothers you just don't attend I'm down for anything positive but this doesn't affect our parties too much. I'm not the promoter, I actually had nothing to do with the rules being implemented, but I do agree with my team. And cause of who I am, I'm the de facto speaker. I have thick skin so u guys that consider yourself PLUR can attack me all you want it doesn't bother me. I'm just here for the music. — Diplo

Kids draw masterpieces - they're the best painters ever. I think the same with music. They could totally write amazing music if they just had the right tools. It's important at that age to set up something, and then maybe afterwards you can go study your violin for 500 hours a week. But at least in the beginning you know about the options. — Bjork

One of the biggest challenges in the past for me in working on the networks was that audiences have grown accustomed to television being something that keeps you company-background music, something that you have on while you're flipping through a magazine, cooking dinner, talking on the phone, putting the kids to bed. — Aaron Sorkin

I don't want to do children's music. I write kids songs, but the kids songs I write are for my kids - like when I'm putting them to bed. We sing some song that we made up but I don't want to make a record like that. — Frank Black

Where once such devices were relegated to appropriate times, now they've become necessities. The other day I watched a kid come off the school bus listening to music on his headphones, oblivious to the traffic zooming past him. And I can't even begin to count the times I've thought pet owners were talking to their dogs while taking them for a walk when, in reality, they were blabbing on their cell phones. It's a different level of use than we've seen in the past, ... It's becoming more of a full-day listening experience as opposed to just when you're jogging. — Robert Novak

Arts education is a big part of building a 21st century creative mind, and I think that we have let way too many kids lose their way by not drawing in their young minds with music, dance, painting and the other various ways we can express those things we do not have words for. — Heather Watts

While I was rapping I was always involved in youth work - I ran music workshops for teenagers and young offenders all the time and also ran a charity for refugee kids for a time. — Doc Brown

I want kids to understand that making pictures is similar to making music; there are so many instruments and so many tunes that the possibilities for how you play are truly limitless. — Jerry Pinkney

I remember when I was a kid, when I just used to love listening to something again and again and over and over. You know, everybody else got sick of it, but I loved that discovery of music and what it did to my world, to my imagination. And so I started really considering, "Yeah, I've got to do more," for kids, particularly. — Cat Stevens

Traditionally, when we lived here [in Portland], we have a record player in the living room, and there's lots of stuff playing, all different kinds of music. I don't listen to any of those Internet radio things. I have iTunes on my thing, but I've never bought a single thing on it. Except for "Call Me Maybe," for the kids or whatever. Carly Rae Jepsen. — Stephen Malkmus

I'm an old-school, embarrassing Joni Mitchell fan. Her music made a hook in my soul and hasn't let go for all these years. I even sing her songs as lullabies to my kids. — Edie Falco

I can have a song with Ariana Grande that is going to be the song for all the kids and the teen girls, and then another song that could be for a different group of people who all love the song. I'm with whoever. Whatever type of people want to love the music and whatever they love about the music is fine with me. — Mac Miller

I haven't always wanted to be an actor, no. I wasn't one of the little kids that was desperate to be an actor. I did a lot of drama and a lot of music, but it was just something for fun on the side. I was quite shy as a kid and I found a lot of freedom in performing. I never knew you could do it as a job. — Gemma Chan

Kids don't care about rock and roll as much as they used to, as the other generations have. It's already turned into nothing but a fashion statement and an identity for kids to use as a tool for them to fuck and have a social life. — Kurt Cobain

No matter what does, or doesn't, happen for me in the music industry, getting to play the Opry as a kid was always be a highlight of mine. — Charlie Worsham

The best pay off in the world is when someone comes up to you and says, 'your music has helped me with some pretty rough times through life. I don't know if I would still be here if it was for your music whether it be country music or heavy metal has done for me.' That's ultimately the biggest payoff for me. I hear it from young kids to military guys and military women to older folks. — Hank Williams III

Music is such an incredible tool for kids in general. They learn discipline; they learn how to express themselves. You learn math. You learn language. It's the ideal teaching tool, and that's why it's mind-boggling when any school superintendent decides that music is something we can kind of do without. — Joshua Bell

I had great, great times as a Little League coach. People were talking about me quitting acting, and they would say, What about your creative juices? Coaching is creative, because you could take a kid who thought he wasn't any good and, within four minutes, change his mind. And I didn't have to wait six months for them to put music to it. — James Caan

Pink Floyd was music for rich college kids, and we were the exact f**king opposite of that. — Ozzy Osbourne

The parents used to drag the little ones, and now the kids are coming
and they're not little anymore. Things are evolving. Maybe there's a renaissance for our music. — Jonathan Cain

Music for me has been my breath, my backbone since I was a little kid. Anything that comes to my life, hard time or good time, I always find comfort in music. — Angelique Kidjo

The main reason I became a teacher is that I like being the first one to introduce kids to words and music and people and numbers and concepts and idea that they have never heard about or thought about before. I like being the first one to tell them about Long John Silver and negative numbers and Beethoven and alliteration and "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and similes and right angles and Ebenezer Scrooge ... Just think about what you know today. You read. You write. You work with numbers. You solve problems. We take all these things for granted. But of course you haven't always read. You haven't always known how to write. You weren't born knowing how to subtract 199 from 600. Someone showed you. There was a moment when you moved from not knowing to knowing, from not understanding to understanding. That's why I became a teacher. — Phillip Done

Statistically, Portland, Oregon has the most street kids, like kids that run away from home and live on the street. It's like a whole culture thing there. If you walk around on the streets, there are kids living on the streets, begging for money, but it's almost like a cool thing. They all just sit around and play music and squat. — Laura Ramsey

There was Ffloyd, the Human Money Tree: the music would suddenly stop and Ffloyd would run through the room, naked, with a hundred one-dollar bills taped to his body. He ran in one door and out the other. A free-for-all ensued and whatever you grabbed was yours to keep.
That idea proved so popular, it morphed into the $1,000 Drop. Michael would stand on a table and toss a thousand dollar bills to an often violent mob. Of course, he usually pocketed $990 and passed the remaining ten on to tip-challenged friends. But two hundred blue-faced freaks still screamed and cried and clawed and climbed to get to Michael; why, you would have thought the New Kids on the Block were masturbating on stage, the way everybody carried on. — James St. James

When I first started making music, for about the first 10 years, I was always the young kid. Everyone referred to me as such in any band. — Justin Broadrick

They tell us "Rock'n'roll is the devil's music." Well, let's say we know that rock is the devil's music, and we know that it is, for sure ... At least he f-kin' jams! If it's a choice
between eternal Hell and good tunes, and eternal Heaven and New Kids on the f-kin' Block ... I'm gonna be surfin' on the lake of fire, rockin' out. — Bill Hicks

The 1960s were big for folk music, and the Kingston Trio led the way. They were the ones who started it all. The music was fresh and alive. College kids loved it and their parents did, too. — George Grove

The Day of Judgment was coming and sinners were going to burn, burn, burn in the fire of hell. "Repent", he roared. "You don't have to anything to sin you just have to think it. Yes, sexual fantasies were a sin. All this sinning must stop". He asked for loud music to stop videos and televisions to be thrown into the bin. They were corrupting our innocent kids. "Repent, repent "he roared again. His temper was so bad he looked flushed and had to ask the choir to sing to regain his voice. The choir sang Jesus Loves You. Everybody was talking about Fr. Shaw's sermon from the pulpit for the whole week. — Annette J. Dunlea

Overnight, punk had become as stupid as everything else. This wonderful vital force that was articulated by the music was really about corrupting every form-it was about advocating kids to not wait to be told what to do, but make life up for themselves, it was about trying to get people to use their imaginations again, it was about not being perfect, it was about saying it was ok to be amateurish and funny, that real creativity came out of making a mess, it was about working with what you got in front of you and turning everything embarrassing, awful, and stupid in your life to your advantage. — Legs McNeil

We talk a lot on 'Biggest Loser' about how fitness is a natural antidepressant, how it burns off stress. What I like about running is that it gives me time alone. I'm always busy, with people at work, with my kids. I love getting out for a run by myself and just listening to my music. — Alison Sweeney

The kids that are making the ghetto stuff I can't even reach are the ones that are inspiring me to play music for the other kids in the city they don't even know about. If I don't get those kids making music, there won't be an original kid DJing like me in five to 10 years. — Diplo

Music is the major form of communication. It's the commonest vibration, the people's news broadcast, especially for kids. — Richie Havens

These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space Brothers as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance. Brought up on space heroes and super beings, as revealed to them in comic books and TV shows, the whole galaxy was their birthright, just as Mad magazine and cheap B-movies had shown them hows stupid and flimsy a construct daily life could be. To the subtle dismay of their parents, this was a generation capable of thinking the unthinkable as a matter of course. That their grand cosmological adventure should come to an end just as Neil Armstrong succeeded in bringing Suburbia to the Moon is another story and it will have to wait for another time. — Ken Hollings

Music is the art of all the invisible things that are real. Art, emotion, spiritual essence, consciousness - these things are hard to prove. Music helps you to focus on your sound. We understand that for very young kids. — Wynton Marsalis

The mall is good for hearing new music because you hear music everywhere. I like to walk around the mall and hear what the kids are listening to, or what's the feel of Middle America, cause that's what the mall is. — Ester Dean

The thing that pleases me the most about it is that young people like it. It's given kids from 6 to 16 an alternate view of music to what's been available for the past 20 years. — George Harrison

I'm not a cinematic cinematic person. I go to the movies like I did back when I was a kid. I go to the movies and I sit down. If the music works, hmm. If it doesn't work, hmm. The whole concept of the thing, not as one piece here or there. For me, music is a large part. — Melvin Van Peebles

Football really was my salvation in high school. For some kids it's art. For some it's music. For me, it was strapping on those pads, yanking that helmet over my head, and getting out there with the team. — Rudy Ruettiger

Angel, you got checkout girls in these here grocery stores cain't feed their own kids right, jazz musicians workin' for the post office because music don't pay the charge of admission to a nightclub. You might love your work but one day you wake up and find that your work don't love you. — Walter Mosley

education and money. I go to church with the kids for the same reason Genie and I play our grandchildren classical music and litter the floors and chairs all over our home with open art books. Jack, age three, eats his lunch with a big Goya book propped in front of him asking for the — Frank Schaeffer

I wasn't a kid when I came out. Soulja Boy was 16. I'm saying that when he came out he was a kid so it was naturally a show for him. It's not about the music right away. It's a show for him. Not that he's not putting enough effort into his music, but how much effort can a 16 year old put into his music because as you mature and get older even the songs he's doing now has evolved and he's looking back. — Nelly

Surfing music is dead. It was just a summer craze for kids on the beach. I'm finished with it. — Brian Wilson

I wouldn't know anything about opera music if it wasn't for Bugs Bunny. That was my entire introduction to opera music. I wouldn't know anything about classical music if it wasn't for "Fantasia." They didn't have to do that stuff. They chose to base this ridiculous, funny, intriguing, creative story on this beautiful classical music. It's the combination of the high and the low that I thought was very cool. But I had no concept of it as a kid. — Jon Hamm

Music to me, still to this day, is this wide open landscape of potential sounds (and I have more words for it now as a grown person), but as a little kid I used to think, "oh, you can just make up melodies and sometimes when you make certain melodies it makes you feel a certain way." — Josh Garrels

Other than a few years of piano as a kid, I don't have all that much musical training. I played piano for all the musicals in high school and was in a few bands, but never really considered music as a viable career until I was in college. — John Keltonic

The whole thing about rock music, pop music, is it's really for kids. — Juliana Hatfield

I was in my teens and I was going through a bit of a phase, drinking a lot and doing E tablets and getting into street fighting and getting depressed. Then I'd listen to Marley and it lifted me out of it. I'd like to try and do the same for kids, that my music would give them a bit of hope and strength, and they'd know that I was telling the truth and I wouldn't lie to them. — Damien Dempsey

If you haven't got a gun, you can't shoot anyone. We need to look at how these guns are getting into our communities. It's about replacing the negativity with good stuff. Give kids music studios in the community they can use for free and see how they learn to work together. Football and music unify kids. — Ashley Walters

Defining the very earliest music and still prominent in many cultures, this musical sound stresses beat over melody, and may in fact include no melody at all. One of the reasons for the popularity of rhythm-only music is that anyone can immediately play it at some level, even with no training. Kids do it all the time, naturally. The fact that I often catch myself spontaneously tapping my foot to an unknown beat or lie in bed just a bit longer listening contentedly to my heartbeat is a testament to the close connection between life and rhythm — Anonymous

We tiptoe around like we're the Frank family and the Gestapo is downstairs. The baby monitor is in our room, and the unspoken rule is that when the kids go down, so do we. So at seven P.M., I'm in bed waiting for the sandman to come. I can't watch TV, because the noise may wake up the kids; I can't listen to music with my iPod earbuds, because then I can't hear the monitor; and I can't have sex, because that could wake up Janice. — Billy Crystal

I've been doing music for a pretty long time, since I was a kid, and I must have been around 10 years old when I started playing shows with my siblings. — Stacey King

I'm not even sure I want kids, by the way, even if I'm not the one who has to be pregnant. It seems too risky. I mean, what if you end up with a kid that's just plain bad? Or stupid? It's not like you can give it away or put it in a garage sale or something. You're pretty much stuck with it for a long time.
I know now they have all these tests they can do so you can find out if your kid has three arms or is retarded or whatever, but you can't test for everything. You can't test for crazy, for example, or for bad taste in music and clothes and stuff. You can't know if your kid is going to be someone you would actually want to have hanging around. You just have to take your chances. That seems like a pretty big gamble to me. — Michael Thomas Ford

I feel like I have a very unique perspective especially for someone in the hip-hop genre. I'm not afraid to explore it, and how my upbringing then shapes my music and being a New York kid and all of that stuff ... that's really the most unique thing I can offer to the music in general. — Hoodie Allen

I remember, the first time I came to the United States in 1996, I didn't speak a word of English at the beginning. I am very thankful for this country and the opportunity music has given me ... My three kids were born here in Miami; they speak Spanish at home, but English with all their friends. — Juanes

There's an evolution from, today we tell computers to do stuff for us, to where computers can actually do stuff for us. For example, if I go and pick up my kids, it would be good for my car to be aware that my kids have entered the car and change the music to something that's appropriate for them. — Sundar Pichai

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that. — Brian Eno

In my life, looking at other women who have been pregnant while writing, I always feel like it's kind of their most musical or the closest to themselves. I think for me it's such a validating moment, you know. I always knew I wanted to have kids, and I've been making music all my life. — Kelis

[As a kid] I felt it was really weird that music schools behaved like a conveyor belt to make performers for those symphony orchestras. If you were really good and practiced your violin for a few hours a day for ten years you might be invited to this VIP elite club. For me music was not about that. It is about freedom and expression and individuality and impulsiveness and spontaneity. It wasn't so Apollonian; it was more Dionysian. — Bjork

We really feel very humbled that we are a part of so many lives around the globe and that we can help connect people from everywhere with and through our music. My experiences with fans are mostly wonderful and I am always so grateful when I see what kind of positive effect our music has on people. All of our fan experiences are memorable in different way, but it is especially powerful and meaningful when you can feel that someone is really inspired with what you are doing. This is especially true for the young generation. It feels good to know that we can get these kids to pick up classical instruments and see them as instruments they can rock on. — Luka Sulic

Well, my mom taught public school music for almost 40 years. And she's about 5 feet - and very mighty. And she would control her kids a lot by giving them the eye, or the stare. — Vanessa Williams

I looked at my family and I said, "I've got a spouse. I've got three kids. There's no way I'm ever buying a music subscription service for the five of us. It's just not going to happen." So we wanted to do something really great for families ... It wasn't easy. We had to convince the labels it was in their best interests, too. — Eddy Cue

The majority of the high schools and the public schools in N.Y.C. don't even have band programs. Hip-hop in a lot of ways is an outgrowth of a lack of instruments and a desire to play music, so we can't really fault the kids for that. — Wynton Marsalis

People consume music in a very different way. It doesn't seem to be as all-important as it used to be for us. Kids have got computer games and a million other things to keep themselves entertained. We had music and our imaginations, and that was it. — Midge Ure

I go to see my kids in school plays, ... I watched Lorna in a concert at the Westminster College of Music the other day and it was amazing. I felt very proud and surprised. I don't know why I was surprised, because I've known her for 17 years, but I've never seen her do anything like that in front of an audience. It's brave, it's uplifting. — Sean Bean

He knew how the audition was going to affect their lives for the next ten weeks as she slowly lost her mind from nerves and the strain of trying to scrounge precious practice time from an already jam-packed life. No matter how much time poor Sam gave her, it would never be quite enough, because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition. She needed to go to a mountain chalet (somewhere with good acoustics) and live and breathe nothing but music. Go for walks. Meditate. Eat well. Do all those positive-visualization exercises young musicians did these days. She had an awful suspicion that if she were to do this in reality, she might not even miss Sam and the children that much, or if she did miss them, it would be quite bearable. — Liane Moriarty

I just naturally started to play music. My whole family played-my daddy played, my mother played. My daddy played bass, my cousin played banjo, guitar and mandolin. We played at root beer stands, like the .Drive-ins they have now, making $2.50 a night, and we had a cigar box for the kitty that we passed around, sometimes making fifty or sixty dollars a night. Of course we didn't get none of it, we kids. — T-Bone Walker

I don't just do music for the clubs, I do music for the struggle. I do music for everyday niggas, the kids who ain't got no sense of direction. I'm trying to restore some of the morals back into the game, as far as the street. — Young Jeezy

Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language. It's the reason Homeric bards sang their epic oral poems, the reason that the Torah is marked up with little musical notations, and the reason we teach kids the alphabet in a song and not as twenty-six individual letters. Song is the ultimate structuring device for language. — Joshua Foer

The New Kids took some hits for, you know, not writing their own music. But on a songwriting standpoint, I mean, I'd never written music before when I was in the group, ... Now the music is my music, so it's kind of like my baby, and that was a whole different experience. — Joey McIntyre

I learned an invaluable lesson from a kid in Argentina when we were playing Buenos Aires in 2002. I came out of the hotel and this 16-year-old-boy asked me to sign his copy of my Six Wives of Henry VIII album. As I was signing it I asked him 'what does a 16 year-old like about this old music?' and he looked at me, quite hurt, and said, 'it might be old to you, Mr Wakeman, but I only heard it for the first time last week. When you hear something for the first time, it's new.' I've never forgotten that. — Rick Wakeman

One of the great things about rap music ... it leaves a lot to be desired, as far as I'm concerned, musically, but I do recognize the very important place that it has in music and in creating role models for younger kids to emulate, giving them the dream that they can make it out of whatever situation they're in. — Graham Nash

Socially, hip-hop has done more for racial camaraderie in this country than any one thing. 'Cause guys like me, my kids - everyone under 45 either grew up loving hip-hop or hating hip-hop, but everyone under 45 grew up very aware of hip-hop. So when you're a white kid and you're listening to this music and you're being exposed to it every day on MTV, black people become less frightening. This is just a reality. What hip-hop has done bringing people together is enormous. — Michael Rapaport

My fans saw 'Roll Bounce,' but also that older crowd who might not have been familiar with me on the music tip saw 'Roll Bounce' and loved it. 'Roll Bounce' opened up that door for me to have older people love Bow Wow and opened up that door so all of the kids would love Bow Wow. My fan base is really diverse; it's all ages and all colors. — Bow Wow

Kids are taking music for free all the time. They have Spotify, Pandora ... The record companies aren't making the kind of music that they used to make. Artists make their money on tours, not from album sales. — Malcolm D. Lee

I don't want kids listening to my music thinking it's for their parents. I want them to feel it's theirs. — Mayer Hawthorne

Sitting up all night would be pointless if somebody you loved wasn't sitting up with you, picking out music to play and helping you kill the bourbon. Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets. — Peter S. Beagle

As for LSD, I highly recommend it. We had a fine, wild weekend and no trouble at all. The feeling it produces is hard to describe. 'Intensity' is a fair word for it. Try half a cube at first, just sit in the living room and turn on the music - after the kids have gone to bed. But never take it in uncomfortable or socially tense situations. And don't have anybody around whom you don't like. — Hunter S. Thompson

The real reason we ended up getting into that type of music was our dad worked for an oil company so we spent a year overseas when we were young kids. Because of that, it was all Spanish TV and radio so we ended up having these '50s and '60s tapes, tapes of that music. — Zac Hanson

Jazz. Here in Germany it become something worse than a virus. We was all of us damn fleas, us Negroes and Jews and low-life hoodlums, set on playing that vulgar racket, seducing sweet blond kids into corruption and sex. It was a plague sent out by the dread black hordes, engineered by the Jews. Us Negroes, see, we was only half to blame - we just can't help it. Savages just got a natural feel for filthy rhythms, no self-control to speak of. But the Jews, brother, now they cooked up this jungle music on purpose. All part of their master plan to weaken Aryan youth, corrupt its janes, dilute its bloodlines. — Esi Edugyan

I could already hear the music inside, the murmur of people, kids I'd gone to school with for the last twelve years, dressed up and pretending to be the adults we'd all eventually turn into, whether we wanted to or not. — Joe Schreiber

The sidewalks were jammed and the crowds drifted slowly past bars from which disco music blared and where men sat on barstools looking out the windows. The air smelled of beer and sweat and amyl nitrate. At bus benches and on strips of grass in front of buildings, men sat, stripped of their shirts, sunbathing and watching the flow of pedestrians through mirrored sunglasses. Approaching the bar where I was meeting Hugh, I smelled marijuana, turned my head and saw a couple of kids sharing a joint as they manned a voter registration table for one of the gay political clubs. I stepped into the bar expecting to find more of the carnival but it was nearly empty. The solitary bartender wiped the counter pensively. — Michael Nava