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It's a petty thing, but I wouldn't join the Scouts when I was a kid, 'cause you had to swear allegiance to the queen. I'm just not a royalist. I think it's idiotic, a hereditary principle.

Elvis Costello

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Elvis Costello
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: August 25
Composer
Guitarist
Record Producer
Singer-Songwriter
London
England
Declan Patrick MacManus
Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus
Declan MacManus
Wouldn
Idiotic
Cause
Allegiance
Principles
Petty
Causes
Queen
Kids
Swear
Thing
Queens
Think
Join
Scouts
Thinking
Principle
Hereditary

More quotes by Elvis Costello

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The Internet is overrated. It's much smaller an innovation than people think it is. I don't think it's changed the way anybody makes music.
Elvis Costello
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People tend to repeat the same quotes at me that I said when I was 23. And of course, you say things then, and sometimes they're ill-advised.
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I think when I was younger I was not very good at writing love songs that didn't have a twist.
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I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.
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It's the damage that we do and never know. It's the words that we don't say that scare me so.
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The truth can't hurt you, it's just like the dark. It scares you witless, but in time you see things clear and stark.
Elvis Costello
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You must hold on to the sort of finger-painting aspect of music. That's something I learned, particularly from listening to Neil Young. Tom Waits is another one, because Tom's music is incredibly sophisticated and beautifully arranged, but he's using a toolbox that's unlike anybody else's.
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Those days she was just a beautiful girl, now she's framed and hung up.
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Anything that has to travel all the way down from your cerebellum to your fingertips, there's a lot of things that can happen on the journey. Sometimes I'll listen to records, my own stuff, and I think god, the original idea for this was so much better than the mutation that we arrived at.
Elvis Costello
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Sometimes I write notes that I have difficulty singing. And you start talking yourself out of the bold melody and start wanting to arrange it in another key or something. Maybe I just never learned my harmony part, because what everybody says sounds odd to them sounds perfectly natural to me.
Elvis Costello
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Smokey Robinson writes the heartfelt songs, whereas it was my job to write the songs about weakness and failure in love.
Elvis Costello
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Don't tell me you don't know what love is When you're old enough to know better.
Elvis Costello
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I wish you luck with a capital F.
Elvis Costello
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It's not crazy to want to have certain songs be developed harmonically and still want to make noise with the guitar. And you can have both.
Elvis Costello
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The radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools tryin' to anesthetize the way that you feel.
Elvis Costello
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Some people can't physically hear things. A kid that listens to Metallica or something can't hear that, because he's filled himself up with this stuff, he physically can't hear a banjo or a harp or something.
Elvis Costello
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Clowntime is over Time to take cover While others just talk and talk Somebody's watching where the others don't walk.
Elvis Costello
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I'm a man with a mission in two or three editions And I'm giving you a longing look Everyday, everyday, everyday I write the book.
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Days of Dutch courage, just three French letters, and a German sense of humour.
Elvis Costello
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I mistrust these people in music industry who can be everybody. This is where technology dictates to them. I mistrust that, that in somehow the chips capture the soul of a player, that's patent nonsense.
Elvis Costello