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Listening Quotes

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Listening Quotes

“We imagine that if we had time we would quiet our more shallow selves and listen to a deeper flow of inspiration. Again, this is a myth that lets us off the hook - if I wait for enough time to listen, I don't have to listen now, I don't have to take responsibility for being available to what is trying to bubble up today.”

“As I write, Johnny Rotten's first moments in "Anarchy in the U.K." - a rolling earthquake of a laugh, a buried shout, then hoary words somehow stripped of all claptrap and set down in the city streets - I AM AN ANTICHRIST - Remain as powerful as anything I know. Listening to the record today - listening to the way Johnny Rotten tears at his lines, and then hurls the pieces at the world; recalling the all-consuming smile he produced as he sang - my back stiffens; I pull away even as my scalp begins to sweat.”

“I view the United States, today, much like East Berlin. And I'm off the grid. I've tried for 20 years to warn the country about the Democrats and Republicans, and nobody's listening.”

“Alaska Governor Sarah Palin pardoned a turkey, though she said she was amazed to find out that, besides being a bird, Turkey is also a country. Did you see that all over the Internet today? While Sarah Palin was pardoning a turkey, right behind her was a guy slaughtering turkeys. But, see, like most Internet stories, a little half-true. Turns out that, after a couple of minutes listening to Sarah Palin's voice, the turkeys said 'Kill us now.'”

“Whoever will listen will hear the speaking heaven. This is definitely not the hour when men take kindly to an exhortation to listen, for listening is not today a part of popular religion. We are at the opposite end of the pole from there. Religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity and bluster make a man dear to God.”

“I think what you've got are millions of people who are in trouble today. They really are. They're confused. They're working longer hours for lower wages. They're seeing productivity going up but their kids are worse off economically than they are. They're looking at a campaign finance system in politics and they see corruption, big money buying elections. Nobody in Congress is listening to them.”

“I'd have to think about it, but I was listening to this Johnny Cash song today that Tom Waits wrote for him - I think that's the story. For some reason it's a thing that sticks in my brain. He's describing this scene where he sees all these almost biblical images happening kind of in this burrow where this biblical train runs through this yard.”

“The biggest possible thing that we're trying to do is change the conversation about what it means to be a working artist today, and hopefully, as the generation of performers that is training and listening to our show at the same time comes up, and becomes a working generation of performers listening to our show-hopefully that's going to change some of the ways they're looking at the hierarchy of theatre and start to blur those lines a bit more.”

“My feeling about young people who want to pursue a career is - the first thing is do your homework on where it all started. Go back and look at history. Look at why the shows you are loving today happened and the artists you are listening to happened. And do your homework on history. Whether it's musical movies, musical plays, Broadway musical recordings - do your homework! And then, that way you will have an understanding of why, now, certain movies, certain plays, certain musicals are making some sort of sense.”

“[Charlie "Bird" Parker] would sit down and ask [Phil Wood], "What do you think about this whole secondary Viennese school with Schoenberg, Berg and Webern? Are you listening to that music and what do you feel about it?" These were the conversations that he was having. And he also said, what he learned from Charlie Parker was, not that he studied with him in the formal sense, is that the first thing that Charlie Parker would always ask was, "Did you eat today?".”

“I found myself thinking about the distance between the 60s and today through certain moments. Like the Henry Flynt interview with Ubuweb founder Kenny Goldsmith, where he talks about how he was scarred by how proud John Cage was to be ignorant of popular music. Goldsmith says, "Nobody thinks twice nowadays about listening to everything!" Something that had seemed so uniquely, radically syncretistic in Flynt's day seems much more commonplace now.”

“Kids today aren't listening to music audio-only. They're picking up a CD and looking at the lyric sheet and wondering why the pictures aren't moving around. Who wants to do that? It's like Bam Bam Flintstone hanging with the dinosaurs vs. Elroy Jetson who's flying around space. If I'm a kid, I wanna be kicking it with Elroy.”