Best Song, Music, & Lyrics Quotes

Here are some of the best song, music & songwriting quotes. For most, their best works have come from nowhere or have required minimal efforts.

However, there are many who just don’t rely on inspiration to deliver the goods.

So, if you’re a musician / songwriter, who at times doubt your capabilities, its time to write more and more!

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Art Tatum: Look, you come in here tomorrow, and anything you do with your right hand I’ll do with my left.

Art Tatum: I don’t think I’m ready for New York.

A.R. Rahman: “The more I compose, the more I know that I don’t know it all. I think it’s a good way to start. If you think you know it all, the work becomes a repetition of what you’ve already done.”

Ludwig van Beethoven: “To play without passion is inexcusable!”

Bob Dylan: “My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it…In writing songs I’ve learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie…It’s not me, it’s the songs. I’m just the postman, I deliver the songs…I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.”

Bryan Adams: “A songwriter writes songs all the time, whereas just writing a song can be done by anyone, anytime.”

Franz Joseph Haydn: “Young people can learn from my example that something can come from nothing. What I have become is the result of my hard efforts.”

Frederic Chopin: “Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”

Franz Schubert: “Some people come into our lives, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never the same.”

George Frideric Handel: “Whether I was in my body or out of my body as I wrote it I know not. God knows.”

George Gershwin: “Out of my entire annual output of songs, perhaps two, or at the most three, came as a result of inspiration. We can never rely on inspiration. When we most want it, it does not come.”

Hans Zimmer: “I have all these computers and keyboards and synthesizers, and I rattle away. For instance, with The Lion King I wrote over four hours’ worth of tunes, and they were really pretty –but totally meaningless. So in the end I came up with material I liked. We worked on The Lion King for four years, but I wasn’t toying until the last three-and-a-half weeks properly. On Crimson Tide, on the other hand, I just went in and within seconds I knew what I wanted.”

Hans Zimmer: “What’s the point of getting up in the morning unless you’re gonna have an adventure? As the moments of our life are ticking away you have to be aware that it needs to be an adventure”

Johannes Brahms: “Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.”

Johann Sebastian Bach: “There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.”

John Lennon: “I’d spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then, “Nowhere Man” came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down…Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you’re allowed sleep.”

Oscar Peterson: “The music field was the first to break down racial barriers, because in order to play together, you have to love the people you are playing with, and if you have any racial inhibitions, you wouldn’t be able to do that.”

Oscar Peterson: “Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they’re trying to say with jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play. If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.”

Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky: “I sit down to the piano regularly at nine-o’clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous.”

Sean Lennon : “For me, songwriting is something that I have to do ritually. I don’t just wait for inspiration; I try to write a little bit every day.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”

Know of any more quotes by famous musicians? Share funny & inspiring music quotes by famous musicians, singers, songwriters on music, inspiration, love & life.