Don't make music for some vast, unseen audience or market or ratings share or even for something as tangible as money. Though it's crucial to make a living, that shouldn't be your inspiration. Do it for yourself.

I would have been glad to have lived under my wood side, and to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than to have undertaken this government.

Oliver Cromwell

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We always speak well when we manage to be understood.

Moli

Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience.

Victoria Holt

If you're lucky enough to have a pretty girl love you and share herself and sleep with you, make that your secret. The best way to spoil love is by talking to too many people about it.

Rip Torn

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

Aristotle

Will it, and set to work briskly.

Friedrich Schiller

You cannot have the success without the failures.

H. G. Hasler

The thing that's tricky is sometimes the best voices - just because someone hits the big notes and sounds amazing - it doesn't necessarily mean they make the greatest artists.

Kara DioGuardi

If I get a hard audience they are not going to get away until they laugh. Those seven laughs a minute -- I've got to have them.

Ken Dodd

April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St. Vincent Millay