Quote

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.

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
Like
Architecture
Dancing
Stupid
Music
Writing
Thing
Really

More quotes by Elvis Costello

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You need a platform upon which to release an orchestral record, otherwise it's just going to be an obscurity.
Elvis Costello
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I started with rock n' roll and...then you start to take it apart like a child with a toy and you see there's blues and there's country...Then you go back from country into American music...and you end up in Scotland and Ireland eventually.
Elvis Costello
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Certain songs have been written years apart, but they have a natural continuity to my mind.
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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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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It's what's on the record not what labels on it. You know, that's like getting a box of cornflakes and eating the cardboard.
Elvis Costello
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Serious music usually doesn't pay.
Elvis Costello
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I'm drawing from two generations back how to think about music, how to think about why you travel to make music, what the possible pitfalls of that are for the way your life is structured. The good and bad of all of it get into the mix of what's created, what you're creating.
Elvis Costello
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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 wanna bite the hand that feeds me. I wanna bite that hand so badly. I want to make them wish they'd never seen me.
Elvis Costello
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Now I just don't know who to tell to go to hell Who put the old devil in the distorted angel?
Elvis Costello
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I became an altar boy because of the solemn face, but I got thrown out at fourteen for laughing. Because the priest used to mumble everything except the church plate takings.
Elvis Costello
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I feel like a juggler running out of hands.
Elvis Costello
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I believe that music is connected by human passions and curiosities rather than by marketing strategies.
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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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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Music is more like water than a rhinoceros. It doesn't charge madly down one path. It runs away in every direction.
Elvis Costello
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Those days she was just a beautiful girl, now she's framed and hung up.
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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The cost of living in sin would make a poor man out of Paul Getty.
Elvis Costello