"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobodies worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)

"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
— Mark Twain

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
— Aldous Huxley

"If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music."
— Albert Einstein

"It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party."
— Nick Hornby

"Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness."
— Maya Angelou

"Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"Music is to the soul what words are to the mind."
— Modest Mouse (Modest Mouse - Good News for People Who Love Bad News)

"You have to, take a deep breath. and allow the music to flow through you. Revel in it, allow yourself to awe. When you play allow the music to break your heart with its beauty."
— Kelly White

"When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other."
— Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)

"People are talking about immigration, emigration and the rest of the fucking thing. It's all fucking crap. We're all human beings, we're all mammals, we're all rocks, plants, rivers. Fucking borders are just such a pain in the fucking arse."
— Shane MacGowan

"Sometimes, when I'm listening to music, when I listen to the Pixies, I feel like I could scream. I feel like my skin's coming right off me or something. I feel like a whole bunch of bones. It's like some music's got a direct line to my insides, and when I hear it, I go crazy all over, crazy and turned-on and hysterical and so different from the way I look to everyone on the outside that when I look in the mirror, I don't really recognize myself. It's like I want to have sex or kill someone when I feel like that, and then I think I'm pretty crazy and I can't ever tell anyone I have those feelings. Not Ted. Not anyone. "
— Louisa Luna, "Brave New Girl"

"I love the relationship that anyone has with music...because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out...It's the best part of us probably..."
— Nick Hornby

"I don't like my language watered down, I don't like my edges rounded off."
— Ani DiFranco

"Sometimes i'd stand by the royal walls.
The sky would be so big that it broke my soul."
— Regina Spektor

"Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

""I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.""
— Jonathan Lethem (You Don't Love Me Yet: A Novel)

"Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend."
— Ludwig van Beethoven

"I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it."
— Igor Stravinsky

"The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are."
— Stephen J. Rivele

"Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food."
— Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)

"I've always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their routines if they burst into song at significant moments."
— John Barrowman

"I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that's it, that'll be me, you know, that'll be me."
— Nick Cave

"Music is the only religion that delivers the goods."
— Frank Zappa

"Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"They all trying to say something with music that you can't say with plain talk. There ain't really no words for love or pain. And the way I see it, only fools go around trying to talk their love or talk their pain. So the smart people make music and you can kinda hear about it without them saying anything."
— Gloria Naylor (Linden Hills)

"'Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.'"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe."
— Douglas Adams

"We are the ones who take this thing called music and line it up with this thing called time. We are the ticking, we are the pulsing, we are underneath every part of this moment. And by making the moment our own, we are rendering it timeless. There is no audience. There are no instruments. There are only bodies and thoughts and murmurs and looks. It's the concert rush to end all concert rushes, because this is what matters. When the heart races, this is what it's racing towards."
— Rachel Cohn (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist)

"What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?"
— Nick Hornby

"He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once."
— Robert Browning

"Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own."
— Leonard Bernstein (The Joy of Music Leonard Bernstein)